#electoral bonds explained

[rightnewshindi]

Electoral Bond: सुप्रीम कोर्ट बार एसोसिएशन ने की अपने अध्यक्ष की निंदा, कहा, पत्र लिखने के लिए नही किया था अधिकृत

Electoral Bond: सुप्रीम कोर्ट बार एसोसिएशन ने की अपने अध्यक्ष की निंदा, कहा, पत्र लिखने के लिए नही किया था अधिकृत

Supreme Court Bar Association: सुप्रीम कोर्ट बार एसोसिएशन (एससीबीए) ने अपने अध्यक्ष आदिश सी. अग्रवाल द्वारा राष्ट्रपति द्रौपदी मुर्मू को लिखे उनके उस पत्र में व्यक्त विचारों की निंदा की है जिसमें उनसे चुनावी बॉण्ड योजना मामले में शीर्ष अदालत के फैसले पर राष्ट्रपति संदर्भ लेने का आग्रह किया गया है। अग्रवाल के विचारों से खुद को अलग करते हुए बार निकाय की कार्यकारी समिति ने 12 मार्च को जारी अपने…

[calledbyflowers]

im so sorry but like..... i fink atheism is actually an identifying characteristic of left-liberal politics at least in a us context. like in the sense of politics as establishing an us vs them like a crucial part of the "them" for the left-liberal is the white male rural christian (the leftist for them is just a left-liberal who is confused and can repent and become an ally in cheering on the democrats in the spectacle of electoralism) and like atheism is part of a central myth of being smarter, superior, knowing better and being right about everyhting. and like not being arent dumb rednecks who believe in religion cuzt heyre smart intelligent educated dogs who believe in science and stuff bwehhhh

and like atheism projects a loathing and disgust that can b attached both to the targets of imperial violence which they r the beneficiaries of and to the them that is defined within their own country and among their own ppl to explain why everything is bad (this being attached in different respects obvs the white male christian american is a figure to be laughed at for the fmost part a joke a mockery a silly and detestable thing which is to be feared only because its stupidity could impact your whole country which to you means all of the human race and like yknow umm the supposed muslim religious radical in the left-liberal collefctive unconscious is a figure who is principally to be feared and more importantly as non-human. the christian american is simplky a destestible human. the muslim is considered a threat and can be killed freely without having commited a cardinal sin-perhaps it is bad to do so but in the way that causing an unwanted miscarriage is like bad but its not murder u dont in doing so sentence urself to deaht)

like the left-liberal analysis is "cuz theyre r these bad mean white christians who r bad and white and christian" and i dont wanna pretend that this is any material or concrete form of oppression like this only smthn w one specific strain of the liberal political tendency but i think it is interesting to speculate on the role that this identity construction which embraces atheism (or some kind of multicultural spuritial practice without specific theologies and ontological commitments - though the two often overlap) as a way to justify their position in society and provide them w an enemy which grants them unity and who thehy can complain abt it w friends is yknow this dumb crazy christian whos so crazy and christian and like thats a social bond it helps lube up the left-liberal social bond to make them cohere as a distinct strain of the liberal poltiical tendency what doe this mean? idk just a funny observe

[bhaskarlive]

SC rejects plea seeking SIT probe into electoral bond ‘scam’

The Supreme Court on Friday declined to entertain a public interest litigation (PIL) seeking a Special Investigative Team (SIT) probe under the supervision of a retired apex court judge into an alleged scam in poll financing using electoral bonds.

During the hearing, the bench presided over by CJI D.Y. Chandrachud observed that the ordinary course of law may remedy the allegations raised in the petition, and asked advocate Prashant Bhushan to explain as to why the top court should interfere in the matter.

Source: bhaskarlive.in

[zingoor]

Electoral Bonds | The Biggest Scam in History of India? | Explained by D...

[mohibburrahman]

Electoral Bonds | The Biggest Scam in History of India? | Explained by D...

[sushilayadav1990]

Electoral Bonds Verdict: Supreme Court’s Landmark Decision Explained

[buglecourier]

"115 Crores Frozen, Don't Have That Much": Congress On Bank Accounts Row

The Congress today faced a temporary hurdle after the Income Tax department froze its main bank accounts, including those of the Youth Congress. However, the party swiftly challenged the move, and the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal granted relief by de-freezing the accounts until a final hearing next week.

The Congress issued a clarification stating that the party is mandated to ensure that a sum of ₹ 115 crore has to be maintained in their bank accounts. The amount has to remain untouched in compliance with the directive from the tax authorities, implying a freeze on these funds.

"This means that ₹ 115 crore have been frozen. This ₹ 115 crore is much more than we have in our current accounts," the Congress said.

In a press conference earlier today, party treasurer Ajay Maken described the move as a "disturbing blow to the democratic process". The freeze reportedly stems from a tax demand of ₹ 210 crore raised by the Income Tax department, a move that the Congress claims is politically motivated and strategically timed to disrupt the party's election preparations.

Democracy doesn't exist; this is like a one-rule party, and the principal opposition party has been subjugated. We seek justice from the judiciary, media, and the people," Mr Maken said.

The Congress leader said that the party has taken legal action in response to the freeze, with the matter currently before the income tax appellate tribunal. In a press conference, Mr Maken explained that they chose not to disclose the information earlier as the hearing is pending.

The party learned about the freezing of its accounts yesterday, and the party's lawyer Vivek Tankha said that a total of four accounts have been affected. Banks have been instructed not to accept or honour Congress' cheques, with the frozen funds to be submitted to the Income Tax department.

Mr Maken claimed that in the election year of 2018-19, the party submitted its accounts 45 days late, but freezing the accounts is an extreme measure. He argued that there have been cases and precedents where such actions were not taken.

"We have given the names of all MLAs and MPs who have contributed, based on the Manmohan Singh committee report," Mr Maken stated.

The Congress leader claimed that timing of the freeze, coming just ahead of the crucial general elections, raises suspicions about the motives behind the Income Tax department's actions

"Right now, we have no money to spend. Electricity bills, staff salaries, our Nyay yatra, everything is impacted. Look at the timing; this is clear," he said. "We have only one PAN, and the four accounts are all linked."

Party president Mallikarjun Kharge voiced his apprehension, stating, "Intoxicated with power, the Modi government has frozen the accounts of the country's largest opposition party - the Indian National Congress - just before the Lok Sabha elections. This is a deep blow to democracy."

"The unconstitutional money that BJP has collected will be used in the elections, but the money we have collected through crowdfunding will be sealed. That is why we have said that there will be no elections in the future! We appeal to the judiciary to save the multi-party system in this country and secure India's democracy. We will take to the streets and fight strongly against this injustice and dictatorship," he added, in a post on X.

This development comes on the heels of the Supreme Court, in a landmark judgment, striking down the electoral bonds scheme. The electoral bonds scheme, introduced by the government on January 2, 2018, was seen as a solution to replace cash donations and enhance transparency in political funding.

[archduchessofnowhere]

Hi! I’m one of your mutuals, but I’m asking this question anonymously because I believe it’s the epitome of dumbnesses 😂 Why the title “in Bavaria” and not “of Bavaria”? This “in” is having me all sorts of confused

Hello! JKSDKFJKGD it's not a dumb question at all! It can be quite confusing, especially because most Sisi biographies just don't explain what the difference is. Or worse, mistranslate the title (this happens almost always in Spanish translations sigh).

I'd be lying if I said that I understand this in detail, but basically the title dates back to the 16th century, however it only started to have relevance after the death of Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria, in 1799. Since he had no legitimate children his heir was his first cousin once removed Max Joseph, the future first King of Bavaria. At the time of the elector's death, there were only two surviving branches of the House of Wittelsbach: the Birkenfeld-Zweibrücken, headed by future King Max, and the Birkenfeld-Gelnhausen, headed by Max's distant cousin and also brother-in-law Wilhelm.

So when Max became Elector in 1799 he recognized Wilhelm as the head of the only branch of the family and they agreed that the Wittelsbach lands would be indivisible. As Elector, Max was the Duke of Bavaria (Herzog von Bayern), and since there could be only one Duke of Bavaria at a time, he gave Wilhelm the title of Duke in Bavaria (Herzog in Bayern). Basically what this distinction denotes is that this branch doesn't rule over any territory, they're dukes and duchesses in Bavaria, not of Bavaria. Duke Wilhelm was Duke of Berg for three years until Napoleon gave the duchy to Joachim Murat and that's it, that's the only territory he was ever in charge of. When Wilhelm died he left his only son and heir Pius August no land to rule over.

But no need to get sad about our territory-less side branch: they were loaded. According to historian Martina Winkelhofer, the Dukes in Bavaria actually had more money than the King. This is why King Max thought it would be great to marry one of his daughters to Wilhelm's grandson Max: so the money stayed in the family. Princess Ludovika married down in title, true, but up in fortune.

In the Wikipedia article of the Dukes in Bavaria it says that King Max gave them the title of Royal Highnesses after 1799, which isn't correct. The agreement was that they would receive the title after Duke Max and Ludovika's wedding. But when they married King Max had already died and the new king, Ludovika's half-brother Ludwig backed down and just… not gave him the title (the reason seems to be that Ludwig just freaking hated his brother-in-law lol). Duke Max and his children only became Royal Highnesses in 1845, when Elisabeth was already eight-years-old.

So Elisabeth's position when she became empress was special, because her title itself was special. On the one hand it was a minor title that basically meant "these guys don't rule anywhere", on the other hand the title also meant that they were closely related to the royal branch. She wasn't a nobody: she was the granddaughter, niece, and cousin of the king of Bavaria, and she grew up in close contact with her royal relatives. But the position of her family was special: they had no territory to rule over, and because Duke Max retired from the Munich society to live a bohemian life, his family had nothing to do on an official level.

In a way, Elisabeth's situation reminds me a bit to her Leuchtenberg cousins, who were also in a limbo of "we are from the ancient house of Wittelsbach but our dad's title is weird and technically doesn't mean anything" (though Elisabeth and her siblings' position was far more stable and secure than their Beauharnais cousins). Ludovika and her sister Auguste in fact were close despite their twenty-years age gap, so I wonder if "our children are royalty but in a strange way" was one of the things they bonded over.

To finish this ask, a trivia: the dukes in Bavaria branch became extinct in 1973, and today's living Wittelsbachs all descend from the royal branch. The last Duke in Bavaria was Ludwig Wilhelm, son of Karl Theodor "Gackl", Elisabeth's favorite brother. He had no children so in 1965 he adopted his grand-nephew Max Emanuel (grandson of his sister Duchess Marie Gabrielle in Bavaria and Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria), who uses the title of Duke in Bavaria as his last name ever since.

I hope you find my answer helpful (and that I didn't confuse more)!

[axvoter]

Blatantly Partisan Party Reviews, 2022 Federal Edition Introduction

It's time for the biggest event in Australian democracy: the federal election. This is the fourth federal election I have reviewed on here, in addition to one NSW and two Victorian state elections. This means I can link to a pretty decent archive of past reviews as I go.

I intend to review every minor party that appears on the ballot anywhere in the country. I will also be reviewing all grouped and ungrouped candidates who appear on the WA Senate ballot (for I now live in Western Australia). As per usual, I will not be reviewing the Greens, Labor, or the Liberal/National parties of the Coalition—if you are the sort of person who follows this blog, you probably know what those parties stand for—and this year I am also excluding One Nation from my reviews for the same reason.

This leaves 32 parties, a considerable drop on last time around: the new 1,500-members threshold is doing its job. There are also two grouped independents and five ungrouped independents in WA. In 2019, I had to write 52 entries to get through all the parties and indies; this time I should need only 35 as I tend to do a combined entry for the ungrouped indies. I do not review indies for lower house seats unless one is standing in my own electorate, and I encourage you to find your local candidates here. This year, I am in the Division of Swan, a swing seat with ten candidates, all standing for registered parties.

If, by some stroke of good fortune, I have time to review independent Senate candidates elsewhere, I will. I already know there are some interesting and unusual ones elsewhere. If you are in Victoria, you will have a choice of 12(!) ungrouped candidates if you vote below the line, including James Bond (yes: Bond, James Bond) and Max Dicks (no really). I hope both of those gents lean into the humour of their names.

I will issue my usual disclaimers up front: I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of a political party. I review from the perspective of a small-g green democratic socialist. I am trained and work as a political historian. This background guides my reviews, which originated as personal notes to guide my vote and do not aim for any false neutrality or objectivity. I share them in the hope they are useful to others trying to navigate Australia's plethora of micro-parties.

I am, of course, not alone in reviewing parties. Leading psephologist Kevin Bonham has already released his rundown of Tasmanian Senate candidates. Beth at b_auspol is reviewing all parties and independents contesting the Senate in NSW and her reviews are certain to be smarter and more clear-eyed than mine. And, delightfully, there is Something for Cate, a blog continuing the thoughtful election-reviewing traditions of deeply-missed Catherine of Cate Speaks.

If you are unsure how to cast a ballot, Patrick Alexander has two fantastic explainers: you can't waste your vote for the House of Representatives and what's the go with voting for the Senate?

Every party registered with the AEC is fielding a candidate in at least one state; last time, out of the 58 registered parties, 4 did not field candidates anywhere. The following parties are fielding candidates in every state and territory: Greens, Labor, Legalise Cannabis, Liberal Democratic Party,* Liberal/National coalition parties, One Nation**, Sustainable Australia, United Australia Party***

*The Liberal Democrats do not have Senate candidates in the ACT but are fielding a candidate in one of the ACT's three seats in the House of Representatives, the Division of Fenner **One Nation has no Senate candidates in either territory, but they have candidates in all five ACT/NT divisions for the House of Representatives ***The UAP's Senate candidate in the NT will appear below-the-line only

There are fewer single-state parties this time around. In 2019, seventeen parties ran in just one state. This year, there are ten single-state parties:

ACT: David Pocock (yes, the party's registered name is simply his personal name); Kim for Canberra QLD: Katter's Australian Party SA: Centre Alliance (Division of Mayo only); Rex Patrick Team [note that Nick Xenophon is a grouped independent; he entered the race too late to register a party and will have an unlabelled square above the line] TAS: Jacqui Lambie Network VIC: Derryn Hinch's Justice Party; Victorian Socialists WA: Australian Christians; Western Australia Party

There are no parties who will only appear on ballots in NSW. This is quite a change from last time: in 2019, NSW led the pack with 6/17 single-state parties running only in NSW.

I will start posting reviews tomorrow. My "running where" statement that opens the reviews usually refers to where the party is fielding Senate candidates—many also have candidates for divisions in the House of Representatives but I only list these when the party has no Senate candidates in a given state or territory. Basically, what I try to indicate with the "running where" category is whether you will see this party on at least one of the ballots in your state or territory.

My reviews will conclude with a recommendation. Before I explain this, I should clarify that in the House of Representatives (small green ballot), you must number every square; in the Senate (large white ballot), you must number 1–6 above the line or 1–12 below the line, and can then distribute further preferences at your leisure. I recommend giving full preferences in the Senate. It is your discretion to stop listing preferences at any point of your choosing after 6 (ATL)/12 (BTL), but, as Kevin Bonham emphasises in the entry lised above, failing to number all boxes weakens the potential political power of your vote. The more preferences you give, the more powerful your vote is; it will stay in the count longer.

Here is my recommendation system for this year:

Good preference: a party with a positive overall platform that has few or no significant flaws for the left-wing voter.

Decent preference: a party with a generally positive overall platform but I have some reservations; or, a single-issue party with a good objective but by definition too limited in their scope to encompass the fullness of parliamentary business.

Middling preference: a party with a balance of positive and negative qualities, or a party with a decent platform undermined by a notably terrible policy or characteristic.

Weak or no preference: a party with more negatives than positives. In the House of Representatives, put these parties as low as possible. In the Senate, I recommend you do likewise to maximise the potential power of your vote; but I recognise that some of you prefer not to express preferences between varying gradations of undesirability or prefer not to rank the most odious parties.

This schema is flexible; I may, for instance, suggest a “middling to decent preference”.

Stay tuned for those very partisan reviews!

[rightnewshindi]

मुख्य चुनाव आयुक्त की बड़ी घोषणा, कहा, समय से प्रकाशित करेंगे चुनावी बॉन्ड डाटा

मुख्य चुनाव आयुक्त की बड़ी घोषणा, कहा, समय से प्रकाशित करेंगे चुनावी बॉन्ड डाटा

CEC On Electoral Bonds: एसबीआई (SBI) की ओर से चुनावी बॉन्ड (इलेक्टोरल बॉन्ड) की डिटेल मिलने पर मुख्य चुनाव आयुक्त राजीव कुमार का पहला रिएक्शन सामने आया है. सुप्रीम कोर्ट के आदेश पर भारतीय स्टेट बैंक (एसबीआई) ने मंगलवार शाम को निर्वाचन आयोग को उन संगठनों का विवरण स��ंपा था, जिन्होंने अब समाप्त हो चुके चुनावी बॉन्ड खरीदे थे और राजनीतिक दलों ने उन्हें प्राप्त किया था. मुख्य चुनाव आयुक्त ने कहा कि…

[erzherzog-von-edelstein]

Germanic Rarepair - Poland and Saxony

---------------------------

Saxony was sitting in camp listening to the flurry of orders in a mix of German and French contemplating his situation. He had a blank piece of paper in front of him and no idea what to put on it. France had said that Napoleon wanted him to write to whatever cousins he thought could be swayed, since he was the sole German state supporting the cause. But, it was not so easy to convince his family of anything. He also was not sure how necessary it was if both Austria and Prussia had been pacified.

He heard the footsteps behind him, but did not turn to look at who was approaching. He thought he recognized the soft footfalls, and waited to hear a familiar voice to confirm his suspicion. Instead hands covered his eyes.

Calloused hands that he knew well, that he had felt on his skin many times before. The person spoke in his ear, “Guess who.”

Saxony knew the answer from the sweet smell of perfume, the brush of long hair against his cheek, and the voice that he could never forget. He answered, “Is it my star-crossed lover?” 
 He got his answer along with a kiss on his cheek, “It is indeed.”

He turned to face Poland with a smile, and was immediately surprised when the other took it as an opportunity to sit in his lap. Poland leaned in close and said, “You could never forget someone as special as me, could you?”

Saxony replied, still someone flustered from suddenly having a beautiful man in his lap, “Of course not.” It nearly took his breath away to be this close again. For years he had only had sketches and portraits from the time when they had been married. It did not compare to the real man. He was so handsome in the flesh that it was impossible to not be in awe.

Poland leaned in even closer and said, “A little birdie told me that you said you’d support Napoleon if he gave me my state back.”

His breath on Saxony’s neck sent a shiver through his body. It had been far too long since they had been allowed to be alone together.

He replied with a smirk, “Did the little birdie have blue eyes and a French accent?”

It would have had to be France that told, since he was the only one who knew the details of the agreement. But Saxony was not going to complain about Poland knowing, especially if it made him amorous. Poland nodded, confirming that France had not kept it secret.

Saxony decided that he would explain his decision, and he said, “I want to undo a wrong. I am certain that Gilbert proposed those partitions as an act of petty vengefulness.” He was certain that it had all been for some imagined slight when Prussia had been a duchy. A proud insecure man was bound to be vengeful.

He added, “And now it is possible to give you back what you deserve. Gilbert is out of the way.” 
 Poland chuckled, “He was humiliated from what I heard. Badly injured and confined to bed. I read that report so many times. It was better than Christmas.”

Saxony could not think of the last time he saw Poland so happy. It was good to see it, even if it had taken a war to get there. Saxony reached up and stroked his cheek and said softly, “If everything goes well, maybe we can get married again if you’ll still have me.” 

He instantly saw all the bravado fall away as Poland showed, for a moment, a flash of real vulnerability. He looked like he was very much pained by the way that their marriage had ended. Poland leaned into the touch on his face like he found it deeply comforting. He said, “I missed you, Christoph. These years alone with Ivan have been hard. ”

Saxony was absolutely certain that he had made the right decision by joining the cause. The look of relief on Poland’s face was worth it. He said, very sincerely, “I have never stopped loving you.”

He could swear that he could almost see tears forming in Poland’s eyes. Poland responded, “I love you too.” Then he leaned in and kissed Saxony on the lips.

-----------------------

Historical notes under the cut:

- Augustus II (better known as Augustus the Strong) the elector of Saxony was elected King of Poland-Lithuania for the first time in 1697. He converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism to take the crown.

- The bond between Saxony and Poland was severed a couple years later by the Swedish invasion of both kingdoms during the Great Northern War, which forced Poland to accept a different Swedish-backed monarch.

- After Russia’s defeat of the Swedes at the Battle of Poltava in 1709, Augustus returned to Poland and ruled the Commonwealth until his death.

- He was followed by Augustus III, who also served as both King of Poland-Lithuania and Elector of Saxony. The Saxon connection was again severed by the partition of Poland.

- During the Napoleonic Wars, Saxony changed sides after the defeat of the Prussians at Jena. It then remained a French ally until the defeat of Napoleon.

-Poland was briefly returned to the European map as the Duchy of Warsaw after the Treaty of Tilsit, which stripped Prussia of its gains from the partition. This new Duchy was a personal union with the Kingdom of Saxony, with Friedrich Augustus I as the new Duke of Warsaw.

-The defeat of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna again erased Poland. Prussia also attempted to completely annex Saxony as punishment for supporting France. This was ultimately unsuccessful because Prussia gaining that much land would imbalance power in Europe too substantially.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 2, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

On Friday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and 36 Republicans sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona accusing him of trying to advance a “politicized and divisive agenda” in the teaching of American history. This is a full embrace of the latest Republican attempt to turn teaching history into a culture war.

On April 19, the Department of Education called for public comments on two priorities for the American History and Civics Education programs. Those programs work to improve the “quality of American history, civics, and government education by educating students about the history and principles of the Constitution of the United States, including the Bill of Rights; and… the quality of the teaching of American history, civics, and government in elementary schools and secondary schools, including the teaching of traditional American history.”

The department is proposing two priorities to reach low-income students and underserved populations. The Republicans object to the one that encourages “projects that incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives into teaching and learning.”

History teaching that reflects our diverse history and the way our diversity supports democracy can help to improve racial equality in society, the document states. It calls out the 1619 Project of the New York Times, as well as the resources of the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History, to note how our understanding of diversity is changing. It notes that schools across the country are teaching “anti-racist practices,” which it follows scholar Ibram X. Kendi by identifying as “any idea that suggests the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences—that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group.”

The Education Department invited comments on these priorities. The department does not have much at all to do with local school curricula.

McConnell’s letter in response to this call for comments is disingenuous, implying connections between the teaching of a diverse past, the sorry state of history education, and the fact that “American pride has plummeted to its lowest level in 20 years.” There is, of course, no apparent connection between them.

He complains that Cardona’s “proposal”—it’s a call for comments—would “distort bipartisan legislation that was led by former Senators Lamar Alexander, Ted Kennedy, and Robert Byrd.” That legislation was indeed landmark for the teaching of American history… but its funding was cut in 2012.

What McConnell’s letter is really designed to do is to throw a bone to Trump Republicans. On Thursday, Trump called for Senate Republicans to replace McConnell with a Trump loyalist, and embracing their conviction that our history is being hijacked by radicals is cheap and easy.

The prime object of Republican anger is the 1619 Project, called out in McConnell’s letter by name. The project launched in the New York Times Magazine in August 2019 to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the first landing of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans at the English colony of Virginia. Led by New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project placed race and Black Americans “at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”

The 1619 Project argued that the landing of the Black slaves marked “the country’s very origin” since it “inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years.” From slavery “and the anti-black racism it required,” the editors claimed, grew “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day.”

Their goal, they said, was “to reframe American history,” replacing 1776 with 1619 as the year of the nation’s birth.

The most explosive claim the project made was that one of the key reasons that the American colonists broke away from Britain was that they wanted to protect slavery. Scholars immediately pushed back. Northwestern University’s Dr. Leslie M. Harris, a scholar of colonial African American history, wrote: “Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war.” The project tempered its language over that issue but stood by its larger argument.

Trump Republicans conflated this project with so-called “Critical Race Theory,” a related scholarly concept that argues that racism is not simply the actions of a few bad actors, but rather is baked into our legal system, as well as the other institutions that make up our society. This is not a new concept, and it is not limited to Black Americans: historian Angie Debo’s And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes launched this argument in 1940 when it showed how Oklahoma’s legislators had written discrimination against Indigenous people into the law. But the idea that white people have an automatic leg up in our country has taken on modern political teeth as Trump Republicans argue that Black and Brown people, among others, are at the bottom of society not because of discriminatory systems but because they are inferior.

The former president railed against recent historical work emphasizing race as “a series of polemics grounded in poor scholarship” that has “vilified our Founders and our founding.” Calling them “one-sided and divisive,” he opposed their view of “America as an irredeemably and systemically racist country.” He claimed, without evidence, that “students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains.” He said that “this radicalized view of American history” threatens to “fray and ultimately erase the bonds that knit our country and culture together.”

On November 2, 2020, just before the election, former president Trump established a hand-picked commission inside the Department of Education to promote “patriotic education” in the nation’s schools, national parks, and museums.

The commission released its report, written not by historians but by right-wing activists and politicians, on Martin Luther King Day, just two days before Trump left office. “The 1776 Report” highlighted the nation’s founding documents from the Revolutionary Era, especially the Declaration of Independence. It said that the principles written in the declaration “show how the American people have ever pursued freedom and justice.” It said “our history is… one of self-sacrifice, courage, and nobility.” No other nation, it said, had worked harder or done more to bring to life “the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice, and government by consent.”

Then–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted that multiculturalism [is]... not who America is.” It “distort[s] our glorious founding and what this country is all about.” Hannah-Jones retorted: "When you say that multiculturalism is 'not who America is' and 'distorts our glorious founding' you unwittingly confirm the argument of the 1619 Project: That though we were ... a multiracial nation from our founding, our founders set forth a government of white rule. Cool."

On his first day in office, President Joe Biden dissolved the 1776 Commission and took its report off the official government website.

But the fight goes on. The Pulitzer Center, which supports journalism but is not associated with Columbia University’s Pulitzer Prizes, produced a school curriculum based on the 1619 Project; Republican legislators in five states—Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, and South Dakota—filed virtually identical bills to cut funding to any school or college that used the material. Other Republican-led states have proposed funding “patriotic education.” In Mississippi, Governor Tate Reeves called for a $3 million fund to promote teaching that “educates the next generation in the incredible accomplishments of the American Way” to counter “far-left socialist teachings that emphasize America’s shortcomings over the exceptional achievements of this country.” South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem proposed a curriculum that explains “why the U.S. is the most special nation in the history of the world.”

——

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[tervacious]

I’m a free speech purist, and this brilliant review and crash course in recent history, is a really good example of why.  Excerpts:

Glasser is best known for his leadership of the ACLU after the organization’s much-pilloried decision to represent neo-Nazis who wanted to march in a suburb of Chicago called Skokie, Illinois. The shorthand outlines of that episode are known on Twitter, but the deeply thought-out reasons for the ACLU’s actions back then belong to a pre-Internet era.

The film was produced and co-directed by Nico Perrino, Vice-President of Communications for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a modern speech rights advocacy group. Perrino is 31. He met Glasser at the funeral of former Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, and didn’t know who he was. Once he got to know the former ACLU icon, he realized that his story was “completely lost on my generation,” but also increasingly relevant, for reasons that become clear minutes into the film.

The 1978 case was horrifying on its face. Skokie was home to thousands of Jews, including many survivors of the Holocaust, to whom the mere idea of Nazis walking past their door evoked not only the terrors of the camps, but the shame and regret of inaction as Hitler’s party ascended in Germany. That was a time when many Jews elected to just pull the shades down as Nazis marched past, in the hopes that they would eventually go away.

What monster could agitate, in the courts, to bring about a repeat of such a scene? If ever there was a moment when speech could be “harm,” rubbing salt in the wounds of camp survivors, who’d spent decades convincing themselves that this leafy suburb in the American midwest was a safe haven, had to qualify.

Mighty Ira traces the reasoning of people like Glasser and ACLU attorneys like David Goldberger, as they connect their decision to defend Nazi leader Frank Collin in Skokie to their years of advocacy in the sixties for black civil rights workers in the South. You couldn’t have one without the other, they argue. “If you give the government the power to stop the right-wing marching in the street,” Glasser says, “they will acquire the power to decide who they think is dangerous enough to stop.”

Glasser doesn’t hide behind technicalities, either, noting that the myriad tricks localities in and around Chicago used to make the speech debate appear to have moved into the private arena, amounted to the same First Amendment obstruction. Requiring that marchers post a $350,000 liability insurance bond, when no private insurer would grant it, was equally a violation. “Those insurance bond requirements had been a classic mechanism by which white Southern towns used to ban civil rights demonstrations,” Glasser said.

Ultimately, the ACLU argued that Skokie was a Tower-of-Babel moment for American law. If you grant the village of Skokie the right to ban hate speech, or require insurance bonds, or prevent anyone in a military uniform from marching, the constitutional edifice comes down and every town in the country will soon be making its own rules. Next thing you know, Forsyth County, Georgia, might be banning Hosea Williams from marching on Martin Luther King Day. “Do you want every little town to decide which speech is permitted?” Glasser asked.

Glasser won the argument then, narrowly, overcoming significant opposition within his own organization. Once he won in court, the Nazi leader Collin decided not to march in Skokie, and was eventually humiliated first by a giant counter-demonstration in Chicago, then by a child molestation charge that landed him in prison.

The episode ended up looking like a powerful affirmation of constitutional principle, helping explain why Robert Kennedy — as Glasser notes, “hardly a man of the left… a guy who had worked for Joe McCarthy and wiretapped people” — had urged Glasser to join the ACLU in the first place. The organization held a unique place in American society, Kennedy told him, dedicated to neither right nor left, but to defending the “root ideas” that held us together...

...Mighty Ira goes shows scenes from Charlottesville and the death of Heather Heyer, which serves as the obvious bookend tale to Skokie. The two narratives are eerily similar. The locals awaiting the arrival of white nationalists in 2017 make exactly the same declarations the Skokie residents made, about how “we’re not going to have it here.”

That Charlottesville ended in bloodshed while Skokie did not is blamed on bad policing, the one moment in the movie where Glasser seems to be copping out. The reality is that Skokie could have and probably would have ended in much the same way, had Collin chosen to march. The more honest answer to the question of why Glasser chose the path he did isn’t so much that it’s the safest or most effective in preventing violence (although in the long run, I think that’s true also), but that democracy is messy, and all the other options are worse.

We hear Heather Heyer’s mother make this exact argument, saying, when asked if those white nationalists should have the right to speak again, “I do, and that’s not a popular opinion.” She adds, “I think once we take away the right to free speech, we may never get it back. My big concern is… who makes the decision, what speech is allowable and what is not?”

In the age of Trump, huge portions of the Democratic electorate are willing to take their chances on that front. As Mighty Ira goes to great pains to point out, minorities and the poor tended to have an easier time understanding the ACLU’s Skokie decision, because the history of the wealthy using restrictive power against labor, communists, and civil rights activists is so long. As a result, they tend to grasp that they’ll eventually be targets of speech rollbacks.

Skokie gets thrown around a lot to justify censorship and how bad the ACLU is (the ACLU is bad, just not for that reason), but most people don’t even know what the hell happened.  I love seeing it told here, because seriously, citing the Skokie case as an example of free speech run amok is and always has been specious at best.

I’m not a liberal, I’m a Radical Feminist, but that said there was a time when liberalism was something you could work with, when you could act in solidarity with liberal causes, and those folks of that type are now so few and far between it’s depressing.  Watching women who are ostensibly radical attack “the Left”, align with rightwingers, and uphold modern “liberalism” which honestly is just conservatism with extra steps, is even more depressing and I wish those of you who do that shit would stop it.  That so many of you don’t even know what you’re doing is somehow even worse than the few of you who think you can strange-bedfellow yourself and your various concerns into relevance.

[theculturedmarxist]

If someone were to tell you that major and influential business sectors like the fossil fuel and health insurance industries simply don’t exist, or imply that major corporations like ExxonMobil and Cigna don’t try to manipulate public opinion and advance a political agenda in order to protect and maximize their profits, you might find it hard to contain your laughter.

But looking at corporate media’s coverage of corporate media, one gets the sense that anyone who dares to suggest that media corporations like Comcast-owned MSNBC, AT&T-owned CNN or News Corp–owned Fox News have their own commercial interests—which incentivize them to push pro-corporate politics—are kooky “conspiracy theorists.”

That’s really strange. After all, there are plenty of reports from corporate media discussing how major oil and health insurance companies spend fortunes to propagandize Americans into believing that a single-payer healthcare system would be disastrous, or that the climate crisis really isn’t that serious, despite all evidence to the contrary (FAIR.org, 1/24/20, 1/31/20). There are whistleblowers like former Cigna PR executive Wendell Potter who revealed how he, along with other paid corporate propagandists, cultivated “contacts and relationships among journalists and other media gatekeepers,” and learned from the tobacco industry’s “groundbreaking work in stealth PR” in order to develop talking points and advance a political agenda to protect industry profits.

So why exactly should we trust for-profit media outlets to be impartial and have their news coverage untainted by their own business interests?

Throughout the 2020 election cycle, FAIR (7/17/19, 8/21/19, 1/30/20, 4/7/20) has documented how corporate media have been trying to play kingmaker by aggressively pushing centrist and right-wing Democratic presidential candidates like Joe Biden onto the electorate, while assailing progressives like Bernie Sanders as “unelectable.” Now that Sanders has dropped out of the race, it’s worth examining the role propagandistic and hostile media coverage played throughout the primary in determining the outcome.

Analyzing the paradoxical phenomenon of the sizable “Socialists for Biden” voting bloc, FAIR’s founder Jeff Cohen (Common Dreams, 3/16/20) noted that although continuous exit polls confirm that most voters agree with Sanders ideologically, many nevertheless voted for Biden, because they perceived him to be a more “electable” candidate against Donald Trump.

Although several people have debunked the myth of “low” youth voter turnout in this election cycle (FAIR.org, 2/26/20; Films for Action, 3/5/20; Atlantic, 3/17/20), it’s true that older voters turned out in massive numbers to support Biden. On Twitter (3/14/20), journalist Malaika Jabali attributed the “generational divide” in voting behavior to an “information divide,” and argued that many older voters don’t suffer from a lack of information, so much as too much information from different sources compared to younger voters.

That influential media outlets like CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the New York Times and Washington Post continue to exercise a formidable class-control function on behalf of their owners and advertisers seems to be borne out by data confirming Jabali’s analysis.

Pew Research (12/10/18) found that although social media has become a more popular source for news,  television still retains supremacy, with 49% of US adults receiving news most often from TV. Whereas young adults aged 18 to 29 receive 36% of their news from social media and 16% from TV, older voters aged 50–64 receive 65% of their news from TV and only 14% from social media, and voters older than 65 receive a whopping 81% of their news from TV and a mere 8% from social media.

Pew (9/26/19) also documented a striking partisan divide on Americans’ trust in the media, with 69% of Democrats having a “great” or “fair” amount of trust in the media, compared to only 15% of Republicans.

Other media studies of cable news like CNN and MSNBC confirmed their pivotal role as an anti-Sanders attack machine (FAIR.org, 1/30/20). According to the Norman Lear Center (5/19), self-identified liberals watch MSNBC at three times the rate of moderates and ten times the rate of conservative viewers. Branko Marcetic (In These Times, 11/13/19) documented that MSNBC’s August–September 2019 coverage of the Democratic primary not only emphasized electability over policy issues, but also talked about Biden three times as often as Sanders, who had fewer negative mentions (11%) compared to Sanders (21%). Another survey by In These Times (3/9/20) of CNN’s coverage of the 24 hours after Sanders and Biden’s massive wins in Nevada and South Carolina found that Sanders received three times more negative coverage than Biden, despite winning by similar margins.

Given Sanders’ massive advantages over Biden when it came to campaign staff and volunteers, organizational and online presence, ad buys as well as money in Super Tuesday states, it’s clear that the media blitz following Biden’s South Carolina win played a decisive role in propelling him to victory in states he didn’t even campaign in (New York Times, 2/26/20).

Yet, in what is truly a collective galaxy-brain level take, corporate media appeared to deny their own existence and how the profit motive compromised their coverage throughout the primary.

Whenever corporate media discuss themselves, they frequently use scare quotes around the term “corporate media” (e.g., Washington Post, 10/24/19; Politico, 8/13/19), as if the term is referring to a nonexistent entity or a figment of their audience’s imagination. This is in stark contrast to their alarmist attitude towards foreign state media outlets like RT and Xinhua, which are frequently referred to as “propaganda” and “state media”—no quotation marks required (New York Times, 3/8/17, 2/18/20).

Yet when they weren’t suggesting they were imaginary, corporate media were also fully capable on occasion of discussing their enormous impact on the race. Vanity Fair’s “Joe Biden, Revenant, Was an Irresistible Media Story—and It Helped Win Him Super Tuesday” (3/5/20) described how Biden campaign aides were gloating to CNN about riding their “earned-media tsunami” to victory in Super Tuesday—referring to coverage that wasn’t paid for following Biden’s South Carolina win—and estimated to be worth at least $72 million during those crucial days.

Despite noting that Sanders actually had more free coverage ($156 million) during this time period from the same “‘corporate media’” which had “written him off” earlier, Vanity Fair argued that media narratives trump any other factor (including money), with Sanders’ narrative being largely negative in contrast to Biden’s:

In recent days Biden has basked in mostly positive coverage, with TV pundits citing his South Carolina victory in arriving at a consensus narrative: Biden, despite poor showings in all of the early-primary states, is the comeback candidate peaking at the perfect moment…. Following Biden’s Saturday blowout, the media narrative shifted from Sanders being the momentum candidate to questions about whether his campaign was constrained by a ceiling due to his poor South Carolina performance, particularly with black voters, the most consistent Democratic voting bloc.

Corporate media frequently noted how Sanders has been their most frequent critic when he was on the campaign trail, and even when they grudgingly admitted its validity at times, they treated Sanders’ media criticism as an ideological perspective on the media, rather an uncontroversial description. Politico (8/13/19) wrote that “Sanders has long accused the ‘corporate media’ of putting the interests of the elite above those of the majority of Americans.” Vanity Fair (2/18/20) wrote: “Sanders has long contended that the agenda of ‘corporate media’ doesn’t necessarily reflect the people’s needs, and his 2020 campaign has doubled as a rolling media criticism shop.” The New York Times (3/5/20) also gaslit readers by attributing critique of the “‘corporate media,’” and MSNBC’s hosts for pushing an “‘establishment’” perspective, merely to Sanders and the “activist left,” as if their critique were only a sectarian complaint.

The Washington Post’s media critic Erik Wemple (10/24/19) mocked Sanders’ critique of the “‘corporate media,’” implying that Sanders hasn’t “done enough research” to “tease out tendencies,” despite writing that “attacking the ‘corporate media’ is good politics for Sanders, and his critiques sometimes land with heft and reason.” Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan (2/12/20) glancingly acknowledged media hostility towards Sanders when she observed that Sanders kept dissing “what he calls the corporate media,” and that his “ardent followers bond with him and with one another by despising the mainstream media, often enough with good reason”—yet she failed to explain this hostility in structural terms regarding media ownership and commercial interests. In the Post’s “Bernie Sanders’s Bogus Media Beef,” Aaron Blake (8/14/19) cited executive editor Marty Baron dismissing Sanders’ claims as a “conspiracy theory,” while the Post’s Paul Waldman (8/14/19) dismissed Sanders’ media criticism as “something in common with pretty much every candidate,” and breathtakingly asserted that “ideological bias is usually the least important.”

Waldman’s assessment isn’t shared by FAIR (Extra!, 10/89), or by Politico’s founding editor John Harris (11/7/19), who admitted that “the pervasive force shaping coverage of Washington and elections is what might be thought of as centrist bias, flowing from reporters and sources alike.”

Another approach to dismissing structural media criticism has been to portray Sanders and Trump’s media criticisms as equally wacky conspiracy theories (FAIR.org, 1/24/20). CNN’s Chris Cillizza (8/13/19) asserted that Sanders’ critique of the Jeff Bezos–owned Washington Post’s coverage is “absolutely no different than what Trump does.” Politico’s John Harris (2/13/20) bemoaned the “dilution of mainstream media’s institutional power” and pined for the days where editors at “major news institutions possessed enormous power” to “summon sustained national attention on subjects they deemed important” with their story selection and framing, while denouncing Sanders for following the “Trump precedent” in “taking flight from public accountability.”

When corporate media didn’t dismiss their bias against him, they sunnily described how Sanders didn’t seem to need fairer coverage from corporate media—and cable news in particular—because nonprofit media outlets, with considerably less resources and reach, are increasingly picking up the slack. Citing the “formidable” influence of “alternative media,” the Los Angeles Times (12/12/19) argued that “coverage in what Sanders likes to disparage as the ‘corporate media’ may matter less to him than to any of his rivals because of the benefit he derives from a surging alternative media ecosystem.” The New Republic (2/12/20, 2/28/20) acknowledged MSNBC’s hostile posture towards Sanders, yet also failed to explain that bias in terms of corporate interests, while arguing that Sanders’ campaign strategy of relying on an alternative media infrastructure to run “against the ‘corporate media’” and “withstand attacks from mainstream networks” has “worked wonders.”

Strikingly, in all these reports, corporate media either misrepresented Sanders’ proposed solutions to corporate media bias or omitted them altogether. Vermont journalist Paul Heintz (Washington Post, 2/26/19), for example, chided Sanders for not understanding what a “free press” does, and claimed that Sanders’ remedy for corporate media is merely “uncritical, stenographic coverage of his agenda.”

In fact, Sanders’ op-ed in the Columbia Journalism Review (8/26/19) echoed many of FAIR’s criticisms of corporate media and proposed solutions:

Today, after decades of consolidation and deregulation, just a small handful of companies control almost everything you watch, read and download. Given that reality, we should not want even more of the free press to be put under the control of a handful of corporations and “benevolent” billionaires who can use their media empires to punish their critics and shield themselves from scrutiny….

In my administration, we are going to institute an immediate moratorium on approving mergers of major media corporations until we can better understand the true effect these transactions have on our democracy…. We must also explore new ways to empower media organizations to collectively bargain with these tech monopolies, and we should consider taxing targeted ads and using the revenue to fund nonprofit civic-minded media.

Setting aside the interlocking commercial interests mass media corporations share with other industries and advertisers funding their coverage (FAIR.org, 8/1/17), just as one can expect the healthcare and fossil fuel industries to launch propaganda campaigns to protect their profits (Intercept, 11/20/18; Guardian, 10/23/19), one can reliably predict these same media corporations to oppose any political agenda that harms their own profitability. Given Sanders’ opposition to future mergers and corporate consolidation of mass media giants, proposals to wield antitrust legislation against Google and Facebook, and levying new taxes to fund nonprofit media outlets, is it any surprise that for-profit news sources opposed his candidacy (Politico, 8/28/19)?

Perhaps future media criticism might sound less “conspiratorial” if we simply referred to outlets like MSNBC as “Comcast,” CNN as “AT&T” and the Washington Post as “Jeff Bezos” instead. When one understands corporate media as an industry in themselves, decisions to have a centrist bias to maximize profits by appealing to liberals and conservatives alike, or creating “information silos” to sell the news as a commodity to target demographics, make a lot more sense. And when we understand the news industry as a top-down institution, beholden to stockholders like all other corporations, we can stop blaming journalists for bad coverage, and start blaming executives like Les Moonves and Tony Maddox for doing things like gifting billions of dollars in free coverage for Trump (FAIR.org, 3/31/20, 4/13/20).

Then maybe claiming that corporate media outlets like MSNBC and CNN are hostile to left-wing political agendas will be considered just as obvious as saying that ExxonMobil and Cigna are opposed to climate action and universal healthcare.