#rightwing dominance in media environment

[tomorrowusa]

It's the media, stupid!

No, I'm not talking about specifics of various news media outlets or nitpicking about particular stories or attitudes. The problem is the vast overall state of the media environment in the United States.

Kate Riga is on target with her blog entry at TMP. (emphasis added)

Democrats Just Can’t Compete In This Media Environment

[T]here’s one leading factor that Democrats absolutely need to respond to as quickly as possible to avert this kind of electoral disaster in the future: the media environment unequivocally favors Republicans. We don’t have a ton of data yet, and much of it is partial. But we can already tell that Harris performed best — that is, underperformed least — in the battleground states. In the places where her campaign flooded the airwaves with her messaging, put her on TV shows and radio stations and in local newspapers, scattered driveways with information flyers, positioned her beside local celebrities, she improved on the repudiation of Democrats that infected nearly every other state. In other words: In the states where she set up a temporary but pervasive media apparatus, she negated some of the nationwide drag. That speaks to the reality that most of the country is awash in right-wing propaganda all the time. For the olds, it’s Fox News and conservative radio; for the youths, it’s the right-wing manosphere podcasts and streams that Trump so assiduously courted all campaign long (plus soothing TikToks promoting retrograde gender roles, evangelical values and distrust of government regulation — think the trad wives and crunchy so-far-left-they’ve-looped-around-to-the-right content — aimed specifically at women). It helps explain Biden’s prodigious unpopularity, despite passing a ton of legislation that not only polls well, but has meaningfully improved people’s lives. It helps elucidate the consistent claims that people don’t know what Harris stood for, before and after she released her policy proposals. It’s a playing field that Republicans not only dominate; Democrats don’t even compete. They still depend heavily on traditional media sources that simply don’t operate the same way these right-wing PR arms do. And we know that these forms of media are powerful; they reach tons of people, and are seen as useful enough pawns that Russia has invested in some of them. This isn’t a novel observation. The Obama alums who started Pod Save America and the greater Crooked Media family did so after Trump won in 2016 specifically to try to build up a Fox News of the left. There are structural problems with mimicking this right-wing content beat-for-beat. The Pod Save guys, while open about their political allegiances, often criticize the party and its politicians. It would be much more difficult to recreate the fawning adoration of Donald Trump Fox News and those podcasts produce for, say, Joe Biden on the left. It requires creativity and investment, but I think Democrats and those aligned with them could do it. Voters say over and over that they prefer Democratic policies — even Republicans often vote for them when they’re standalone ballot initiatives. It’ll require a cultivation of talent, a saturation of these spaces, finagling how to wrest back the counter-cultural bad boy persona from those who are espousing a way of life most people consider retrograde, confining, divisive and exhausting, not to mention solely in service of the plutocratic elites that run the party. Obama was such a revelation because he hijacked technology in a way that was new and exciting for people, and it helped him micro-target low propensity voters. Trump has since taken that mantle. In the two and then four years ahead, Democrats have to find a way to get in people’s eyes and ears, to figure out how to make an affirmative case in these spaces that people would likely respond to if they were exposed to it.

It's not just Fox News – which is bad enough by itself. There are the rightwing talk radio stations dating back to the 1980s. They joined Christian fundamentalist stations which had been pushing social conservative positions since the 1930s. And now there are countless bro types who talk rightwing shit for hours at a time on their podcasts.

Apart from Obama's skillful use of social media when it was still new, Democrats have fallen behind with digital media. Most recently, Elon Musk bought Twitter simply to use it as a propaganda machine. Facebook and its sister sites like Instagram use algorithms which promote rightwing talking points.

There had been attempts to set up liberal talk radio. But they have been sporadic and met with mixed success. Al Franken set up a liberal radio network called Air America Radio in 2004. But it had only modest reach on mostly medium powered stations and ultimately filed for bankruptcy during the Great Recession.

We need to increase our news and information footprint in a major way and on multiple media platforms – and fast. Obviously that takes money and business talent. So if you find yourself next to Mark Cuban, Bill Gates, or Michael Bloomberg on a flight or in an elevator, have your pitch ready. If that doesn't happen, we need to start raising money on our own. Nobody said that freedom is free.

[dailykhaleej]

Rights activists slam ‘witch-hunt’ against Muslim protest organisers in India

Safoora Zargar Picture Credit score: Twitter

Hyderabad: At a time when the nation is consumed by the worry of lethal coronavirus pandemic ensuing in an unprecedented nationwide complete lockdown, the Indian authorities has been accused of pursuing an agenda of focusing on Muslim scholar activists who have been on the forefront of the agitation against the controversial citizenship legislation simply earlier than the virus broke out.

Delhi police, which comes beneath the direct management of the central authorities, has been arresting the coed leaders of Jamia Millia Islami college on the fees of rioting, sedition, making inflammatory speeches and even try to homicide. Whereas police alleged that these activists have been concerned in violence in components of nationwide capital in February, their actual fault, critics allege, seems to be their position in the months lengthy marketing campaign against the discriminatory legal guidelines geared toward nation’s 200 million Muslim minority.

Condemnation

Whereas a few of them like Sharjeel Imam have been arrested in January, with the lockdown kicking in, the focusing on of different Muslim scholar activists picked up momentum. As many as six activists, together with pregnant 27-year-old Safoora Zargar, have been arrested throughout final two months, evoking a condemnation from the human rights and civil rights organisations.

Zargar, the newest to be arrested, was charged beneath the draconian anti terror legislation, the Illegal Actions Prevention Act.

That extra of it was in the offing was apparent from the seen the Particular Cell of Delhi police have served notices on 50 members of Jamia Coordination Committee.

The record of these arrested consists of Khalid Saifi, Ishrat Jahan and Sabu Ansari, all arrested on February 26, Meeran Haider on April 1, Chingiz Khan on April eight and Safoora on April 11. Solely Chingiz Khan was later launched on bail by the courtroom.

Hardcore Hindutva chief

The scholars of JMI, a premier Muslim minority establishment in the center of the capital, had performed a serious position in organising the protest to save lots of nation’s secular structure from the grave threats posed by the controversial legal guidelines like Citizenship Modification Act and proposed Nationwide Citizenship Register (NRC) to determine and expel the alleged international infiltrators.

In Uttar Pradesh, additionally dominated by the rightwing Bharatiya Janata Get together and its hardcore Hindutva chief Yogi Adityanath, Dr Kafeel Khan, a outstanding activist, was additionally arrested and slapped with one other draconian legislation, the Nationwide Safety Act. He can not hope to come back out on bail for at the least a yr beneath the act.

Like Sharjeel Imam in Delhi, Kafeel Khan was additionally charged with making inflammatory speech in Aligarh Muslim College in Uttar Pradesh.

Muslim households focused

Within the giant sale violence, which broke out in North East Delhi in final week of February, 1000’s of Muslim households have been focused. Greater than 50 individuals have been killed, a majority of them Muslims. Tons of others have been injured and 1000’s have been rendered homeless and have been nonetheless residing in non permanent camps. Whereas their retailers and small enterprise have been looted, burnt and plundered, there have been allegations that Delhi’s police largely remained silent spectator or actively colluded with the armed gangs.

However now the identical police has been accused of focusing on the victims’ households and activists who tried to come back to their assist whereas the actual culprits have been roaming round freely.

Zargar has been charged with being one of many key conspirators of the violence. Including to her woes, she is being saved in solitary confinement in Delhi’s Tihar Jail, entry to her has additionally been restricted in the identify of lockdown against COVID-19 virus.

Environment of worry

Her case is harking back to one other Lucknow-based activist and movie persona Sadaf Jafar, who was arrested by Uttar Pradesh police for her position in anti CAA stir. She was brutally overwhelmed up in police custody resulting in bleeding. She later mentioned, “They took me to a civil hospital though the doctors did not attend to my wounds inflicted during the beating. The same night I started bleeding. They didn’t even give me sanitary napkins. I was scared to even ask for water because I felt that I would be beaten up again”.

Such was the environment of worry that even Zargar’s husband and her lawyer are unwilling to make any public remark and have been chatting with the media off the file highlighting her depressing situation in the overcrowded jail in the face of Coronavirus an infection.

Nevertheless some rights activists have condemned the arrests an act of “witch-hunt”. Vrinda Grover, a human rights activist and Supreme Court docket lawyer expressed grave concern over Zargar’s well being. She is now in ther second trimester of her being pregnant.

On the victimisation of the coed leaders she mentioned, “This case shows the diminished access justice during the lockdown is being used to implicate and imprison student activists who led the peaceful anti CAA-protests”, mentioned Vrinda. “This is pure witch hunting by the establishment. Look at their priorities in times of a crisis,”, commented one other outstanding activist Hasiba Amin, convenor of social media cell of opposition Congress get together.

A gaggle of 20 outstanding writers, academicians and intellectuals additionally issued an announcement elevating the questions in regards to the motives behind the focusing on of the Muslim scholar students. They mentioned that the cruelty and utter unfairness was being intentionally demonstrated although such acts. “(It is) A lesson for all Muslims. Fall silent. Be afraid. Learn to accept to live on terms dictated by a majoritarian state”, the assertion mentioned.

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[elizabethleslie7654]

The Problem of Notables

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This article was originally published on the TRS blog.

by Alex McNabb

The far-right has been plagued for years by a problem many are aware of but too few are capable of articulating with any nuance. There have been a few clumsy memes and some grumblings about the worst of the bad actors, and precious little else. I’m talking of course about the toxicity and stumbling blocks created by the various narcissistic grifters that glom onto broader political movements like so many egomaniacal barnacles on the hull of a vastly larger ship. Like any infestation of parasites, they drag down the host and divert limited energies into unproductive directions. How can you develop influence over political outcomes if your “leaders” are just siphoning off resources and attacking each other more than the real enemy?

History is just repeating itself again though, and a veteran of the Algiers Putsch named Dominique Venner wrote about this over 50 years ago in an essay called “For a Positive Critique“. I consider the writing to be a seminal treatise that accomplishes exactly what the title suggests: It’s a check-list of pitfalls for right-wing nationalistic movements to avoid. He even specifically names the type of archetype causing these problems, referring to them as “Notables”.

What is a “Notable”?

Venner draws a strict distinction between “notables” and “militants”. Militants are the rank and file footsoldiers of any political movement, the boots on the ground, the ones that actually get shit done. The militant is committed to achieving tangible political goals and is guided by an over-arching doctrine. He doesn’t follow a man, he follows an idea.

The “notable” on the other hand is simply a highly visible person who makes all the right noises. He isn’t someone that’s risen into his position in the limelight through hard work; this is an “idea man”, and an opportunistic one at that. Notables are self-aggrandizing narcissistic conmen not altogether different from aspiring cult-leaders. How many of their beliefs are genuine and which number are simply the exponent of calculating which buttons to push for maximum attention is a subject ripe for speculation.

I think our modern internet age and social media environs increasingly favor the ascendance of these characters by providing them with a ready platform and access to willing sycophants. Any idiot with a microphone and webcam can now start collecting upvotes from credulous political partisans desperate for “content”. There are plenty of decent individuals out there exploring right-wing issues purely out of their passion for the subject, but these creators generally aren’t going out of their way to cause problems.

Characteristics of the Notable

Notables are fortunately not that difficult to identify and separate from the honest community members. I think there’s a few dead give-aways that should make you intensely suspicious of any public figure exhibiting these traits.

1. Lack of real world accomplishments.

A notable usually doesn’t “do things”, they “say things”. They’re good at saying things; they have a lot of “verbal virtuosity” and stage presence. Your average E-celeb is just someone with the free time to live-action shitpost about controversial rightwing political topics. A significant proportion of them are relatively young, unmarried, childless and just stumbled into 5 minutes of YouTube fame. They tend to lack the sorts of careers that would distract them from camping out in the most active areas of the online map, always looking to increase their audience while simultaneously e-begging for a big enough revenue stream to make adult obligations irrelevant. Leaders start organizing people in the real world, notables engage in mythomania and talk of revolutions that will never come. Does anyone wanna follow a guy that’s never even worked an actual job?

2. Disregard for their own followers and fellow travelers.

As Venner states in his essay, the Notable believes the “militants are an inferior class”, and “are only the rank and file to be used for political struggles”. There are sadly enough literal examples of this type of thinking in alt-right politics among would be “leaders”. To these careerists their audience is an expendable resource to be burned whenever it is convenient to them. They are not personally invested at all in the sorts of people giving them a platform beyond the most short-sighted material benefits and attention. Individuals that should be viewed at least nominally as allies are verbally assaulted, “doxxed” or otherwise discarded as “enemies” for any perceived slight, no matter how minor. The underlying dogma is that their fragile egos matter more than any over-arching political aims or goals.

3. Immoral behavior.

Notables are capricious narcissists. Like any garden variety dirtbag, they’re slaves to the basest of human impulses. Womanizing, embezzling, disloyalty, substance abuse, cowardice, and general shittiness dominate their most visible traits. Unsurprisingly, when caught in some misdeed, these are also the first to snitch and roll over to the police. These are the types of greaseballs that bemoan the loss of morality in western society before trying to seduce their “best friend’s” wife. Beyond the usual assortment of skeletons in anyone’s closet, these types have veritable graveyards full of the bones of a lifetime of underhanded back-stabbing and conscience-free living. If they mistreat their own friends, romantic partners and family, then how can you expect them to do any less to allies and followers in a political movement?

4. Inability to evaluate their own audience.

A more nuanced tell is the notable, like any real narcissist, can burn any level of human garbage to fuel his own ego. All fans are equally valuable regardless of how demonstrably unstable and toxic these demographics might be. A notable doesn’t care if he’s followed by a 15 year old edge-poster or a middle class married man with 5 kids, so long as his ego is being stroked, it doesn’t matter who does the stroking. To the Notable, the adoration of a kissless, forever-alone incel is a heady intoxicant capable of propelling him to dizzying heights of hubris. Sycophancy over substance is the rule, not the exception to the Notable’s cloister.

5. Theatrical revolutionaries

While Venner uses this term generally to refer to any LARPer living out their personal fantasies, one should be on guard in particular against “leaders” that insist on “dressing in a costume called a uniform”. These are profoundly unserious people that have confused a political movement with a Neo-Nazi version of Comic-Con. Dressing up like Hollywood villains is a great way to convince everyone you’re either a clown or a provocateur on the Federal payroll.

This has to stop

All of this matters because of the very real damage these grifters inflict on our fledgling right-wing movements. By engaging in unceasing purity spirals and infighting, these maniacs drive away reasonable, normal human beings capable of generating real political capital. I believe these pathological tendencies are worsened by the online echo-chambers where ego-maniacal leaders and their dysfunctional followers can insulate themselves into thoroughly self-destructive trajectories. Any self improvement is sacrificed for the soothing of individual egos. Overall success has been hamstrung over and over by the crab-bucketing of jealous narcissists more worried about their own self-aggrandizement than cooperating with their peers.

These are the team-killers, the griefers that ruin cohesiveness and collective strength because they’d rather see it all burn than watch someone else take the glory. How many times has a personal beef or spergcel hatred of a particular figure lead to an outcome that effectively set the broader movement back as a whole? Have we not seen entire organizations destroyed by short-sighted, shameful behavior from the leadership? Is it worth it to tolerate someone that will inevitably betray his friends? It’s time to put our hard-earned lessons to work and leave the Notables behind as we move forward into an increasingly perilous time in global politics.

To do that we must demand more from a leader than simply being a posturing mouth-piece. The leader must work for us as an avatar of our collective will, someone willing to sacrifice their own petty ego for the good of the whole. They are responsible for the lives of many and must act like it. “Leading by example” isn’t just a trite catch-phrase; anyone in this position should be an inspiration, not a cautionary tale.

Stop giving oxygen and audiences to swindlers; just let that bad fruit wither on the vine.

“Zero plus zero always equals zero. The addition of mythomaniacs, plotters, nostalgics, careerists, and “nationals” will never yield a coherent force. Preserving the hope of uniting the incapable is to persevere in error. The few elements of value are paralyzed by the cranks that surround them.”

-Dominique Venner

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[marcjampole]

Trump doesn’t waste any time cashing in on tax victory to ask wealthy and ultra- wealthy investors for his cut. His meeting with David Koch is ignored by news media, of course.

There wasn’t anything in the news about what Donald Trump did the day after the Senate gave the current Administration an enormous win by passing a tax bill which will produce the greatest shifting of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy in American history.

You might assume that like on most days, Trumpty-Dumpty played a little golf and tweeted inanities. But if you check his schedule posted online you’ll see that he jetted to New York for three fundraisers. The narcissistic ignoramus to whom the Electoral College gave the most votes last year took a victory lap with both tiny-fingered hands outstretched palms up for cash.

At 11:20 am on December 2, The Donald delivered remarks at a Trump campaign breakfast, raising money for his reelection, a slush fund that will no doubt end up feeding Trump businesses. Next at 12:35 pm came a speech at a National Republican Committee fundraiser. We can assume that the money raised at that event will fund Republican Party operations and races.

The last fundraiser, at 1:50 pm, is the most intriguing of all. All the schedule says is that Trump “speaks to a smaller group of RNC donors.”

Wonder who that smaller group was and where they met? By luck of the draw, I can give you that information.

They met in the apartment building next to the one in which my wife and I live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The reason I know this fact is that our street was blocked off for a few hours by sand trucks and was swarming with local police and Secret Service agents, one of whom told us it was Trump who was coming. A special receiving tent was erected at the side entrance to the building where the overgrown orange infant was headed. No one was allowed to walk on the street, and when we left, we were told that to get back into our building, we would have to supply identification. Just as we were leaving for the afternoon, we saw a procession of limousines arrive. At the end of the article you can find two photos that suggest how elaborately authorities cordoned off the area for Trump’s visit.

The building in question is 740 Park Avenue, a long-time New York symbol of ultra-wealth. 740 Park has its own Wikipedia page and a book has been written about it, 740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building by Michael Gross. Some of the current or former inhabitants of 740 include Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (whose grandfather built it), John D. Rockefeller, Saul Steinberg, Steve Schwarzman, Ronald Lauder, Ronald Perelman, Vera Wang, John Thain and Steve Ross, most of whom are certified billionaires.

While the Donald may have been visiting any of the thirty odd ultra-wealthy tenants in this venerable Art Deco building, I will state with extreme confidence he was there to see David Koch, of the infamous Koch brothers, the main organizers of the juggernaut of rightwing money that has funded conservative think tanks, backed conservative politicians and advocated for lower taxes and deregulation for the past few decades.

As Jane Mayer’s Dark Money details, the Koch brothers, sons of an original founder of the John Birch Society, are the primary organizers of the 40-year campaign of a small coterie of billionaires to change the American political agenda for their own selfish ends. Her book explains the process by which our country has reached the point at which it is overwhelmingly centrist-looking-left but controlled by right-wingers, especially at the state level. It explains how the Democrats could outvote the Republicans by millions and still not have a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. It explains why the mass media focuses on inessential issues such as the deficit or promulgates ridiculous myths such as the social value of lowering taxes and the idea that science is unsure about global warming.

In her update of Dark Money that includes what happened in 2016, Mayer reports that the Kochs kept a billion dollars in their and their associates’ pockets during the last election cycle that they had planned to spend to sway the 2016 presidential election for just about any Republican candidate other than Donald Trump. Yet even though the Kochs sat on their hands in the 2016 election, they are now deeply embedded in the Trump Administration. Mayer reports that the Trump administration is crawling with Koch operatives and lobbyists. Mike Pence was the Koch’s first choice for president in 2012 and has received significant financial support from the Kochs in the past. The Kochs set new CIA Director Mike Pompeo up in business and have provided him with financial support throughout his political career. Then there’s the cabinet, that skewers towards the kind of anti-regulation, pro-oil, climate deniers that the Koch Bro’s love to love. Did Trump say he would “drain the swamp” or “join the swamp?”

In the meeting with Koch and friends, we can only imagine the self-serving bombast with which Trump overstated his role in getting the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” (AKA the “Despoiling of the Middle Class by the Wealthy Act”) passed. He certainly didn’t turn any Democrats, and I doubt that he was the reason that the hypocrites John McCain and Jeff Flake decided to vote for the tax heist. I doubt it was Trump who convinced Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins that 13 million was an acceptable number of Americans to lose their healthcare to fund vast tax giveaways to millionaires, multimillionaires and billionaires. And he certainly didn’t influence the public or businesses, since every survey showed that the vast majority of Americans and American business owners and operators were vehemently opposed to the bill. In retrospect, his main role in force feeding this dangerous legislation through Congress was to keep embarrassing himself with tweets about his various feuds that dominated the top of the news, pushing the awful details of the tax bill to less prominent coverage.

It could be a coincidence that Trump paid homage to Koch and pals the day after the Senate passed the bill, since the signs that there would be no parking on Saturday December 2 had been up on Park Avenue all week. On the other hand, the timing was convenient. Not even waiting 24 hours to beg for money seems completely in character for the crass, tone-deaf Trump.

Trump wants money from David and Charles Koch and their ultra-wealthy cronies, to be sure—for his reelection, for his various business ventures that can profit from campaign expenditures and for the dozens of lawyers he is employing related to the Mueller investigation into Trump’s probable collusion with the Russians during the election and his ham-handed attempts to cover it up. I imagine he would also like Koch to support candidates least likely to vote for impeachment.

I doubt that the erratic, pompous, crude and ignorant Trump mixed all that well with the patrician and hardheaded Koch crowd. I see so many funny ways the meeting played out—Did Koch serve fast food hamburgers because he knows that’s what the Donald likes to eat? Or did Trump take one look at a spread of various tapas, sushi or crudities and dig into his pocket for a candy bar? What comparison to his own garish nouveau riche home and hotels did he make upon seeing the Koch’s furnishings? How crude was he in asking for the bucks? How many overblown guarantees did he make?

The Kochs already have just about everything they wanted from the 2016 election. The tax law will save them tens of millions of dollars right away, and billions more for their heirs at their deaths. The current administration is rapidly undoing a generation of regulations that protect the environment and level the playing field between large corporations and everyone else. The federal government is turning its back on climate change policies. The Department of Education is focusing its energies on privatization. There can be no doubt that the Koch crew would feel more comfortable with Mike Pence as president, or Paul Ryan if Pence has to resign because he helped to collude or cover-up. They’ll be less happy if the Democrats sweep in 2018 and Nancy Pelosi ends up in the White House. My guess then is that once Mueller has presented his evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” Republicans will abandon Trumpty-Dumpty, impeach and convict if Trump does not resign first.

Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, or the current occupant of the Oval Office—whoever is officially in charge by the summer of 2018, the Kochs and their fellow billionaires will continue to pull the strings. And one way or another, the 2018 election—like that of 2000, 2010 and 2016—will be one of the most important in U.S. history. Times are desperate for America, and certainly for the left. The side that wants a polluted, poorly educated nation of rich and poor has the money and the structural advantage they gained from gerrymandering after the 2010 election and creating a multitude of state laws that make it harder to register and to vote. All the American people have is the vote itself.

[takebackthedream]

Words That Hurt Our Public Schools, And Ones That Help by Jeff Bryant

I want to start off today with a story about my mom. Trust me, I’ll eventually transition to talking about education. But my mom’s story illustrates how attitudes are affected by media and language.

My mom was born in 1923 on the plains of North Dakota. Her dad, my grandfather was a farmer-rancher. Her mom, my grandmother, ran the house and brought in laundry, sewing, and other work from neighbors.

But then commodity prices fell through the floor and the Great Depression hit. Then my grandfather’s farm blew away in the Dust Bowl. Talk about a perfect storm.

With hardly any income of their own, my grandparents turned to the public sector, the government, for financial assistance. Through what was called the Work Progress Administration, the WPA, created by the Franklin Roosevelt presidential administration, my grandfather got a position operating a grain elevator in eastern Montana.

With a steady source of income, my grandparents could provide for my mom and her three other siblings. Things weren’t always easy. When my mom knocked out a front tooth in a toboggan accident, she had to have a wooden peg fill the empty space until they had a chicken to pay the dentist and could travel to a town that had a dentist.

Nevertheless, my grandparents, neither who completed more than an elementary school level of education, had access to local public schools for their children, each of whom graduated high school. My mom was the first person, and the first woman, in her extended family to attend community college and then a public state university to earn her degree in nursing education. She was recruited by the US Military to serve in the Nurses Corp training nurses for the frontline troops in World War II.

That job was her ticket out of her small, rural community and led her to move to Dallas, Texas to accept a position in nurse education at a major metropolitan hospital in the late 1940s. It was there that she met the man who would eventually be my father.

Government Is The Problem

By the time I came along, a lot had changed in my parents lives. And by the time I reached my teenage years and began to develop more of an awareness of the larger world, I noticed my parents’ attitudes toward public institutions were changing. Government services and public workers had become subjects of scorn.

If the line of customers at the Post Office was long, it was because of lazy postal workers. When a vehicle needed an inspection sticker or a household project needed a permit, it was government meddling in our lives. Local news stories about any breakdown in municipal services were attributed to “typical” government ineptitude. City busses were irritants in the roadway. Taxes were a theft of family income.

By the time Ronald Reagan became president in the 1980s, it became popular for political leaders to say, as Reagan was fond of saying, “government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem.” My parents were happy cheerleaders for that, especially my mom, despite her personal history of getting a hand-up in life from public services.

So what happened?

Now it’s true that governments at all levels have been less than perfect institutions. The local government where I grew up sure didn’t do a very good job of serving low-income black and brown school children.

But in a democratic society, “government” is ultimately up to us, and what it does is an expression of what we want to do for ourselves.

So what the critics of government are saying, really, is that they have a problem with democracy.

It’s important to know government wasn’t turned into a four-letter word by happenstance. It happened by design.

The War On Government

The liberalism of Roosevelt’s Great Society that dominated politics in the 1950s and 60s was the enemy of those who wanted society to be structured to better serve their interests rather than democratic interests. And by the late 60s and early 70s, these forces marshalled their considerable resources to overturn the public’s role to determine the public good.

I could go on all day about the history of this, about 20th century American conservatism, the Lewis Powell Memo, and the shifting of the Overton Window. There are whole books about it: Winner Take All Politics by Jacob Hacker, Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas.

My parent’s antipathy toward government could have been the result of multiple factors. But there’s no doubt that during their conversion, forces were hard at work conditioning Americans to fear the words “social” and “public,” as if those words are evil or anti-American.

Whether or not you accept the existence of “the vast rightwing conspiracy,” which is what Hilary Clinton would come to call this movement, you can’t deny the impact of a decades-long assault on public institutions and public service workers.

In 2012, the Brookings Institute examined public-sector employment trends over the last three decades and found that government employment had dramatically contracted, both in absolute numbers and as a share of the population. Today, public sector jobs as a share of all employment are at a 30-year low, falling from 9.6 percent in the 1980s to 9 percent 30 years later.

A 2015 article in the New York Times looked at public sector employment and found that even as local and state economies were recovering from the 2008 recession, public sector jobs were continuing to decline, accounting for 1.8 million fewer jobs than in 2007.

The decline in public sector employment has hit black families particularly hard. Roughly one in five black adults works a government job. Black wage earners are about 30 percent more likely to have a public sector job than non-Hispanic whites, and twice as likely as Hispanics.

Many, attribute the success of the anti-public movement to the vast wealth of individuals in big business and finance. That wealth helps for sure.

But I would argue that they have a weapon more valuable than money: It’s the English language.

Language As A Weapon

The war on the public sector uses the power of language on every front. For instance, slashing financial resources for the public good is called tax relief. Laws preventing industrial pollution from fouling our shared environment are called stifling regulation. Public financial assistance for the poor is called a government give-away program. Funds we collectively pool to ensure our financial security in old age are branded entitlements.

What makes these words powerful are the ideas behind them. As George Lakoff writes in his seminal book Don’t Think of an Elephant, words are representations of values, and the war of words is really a conflict over what values are going to guide our nation – whether, for instance, we’re going to have a government that works for the common good, or one that enforces the power of the wealthy few.

I would also argue that the war of words on the public sector has had some of its greatest success in the effort to dismantle public education. (See, I told you I would eventually get to education.) You can see its success in the fact that now politicians in both parties, to quote veteran education journalist Jay Mathews of the Washington Post, basically copy each other on education.

Let’s look at some of the words used to assault our schools and consider how we can fight back:

Public Education Is Broken

How often do you read that “America’s schools are failing” and “public education is in crisis”?

Is there any truth to this? Not really.

In the only longitudinal measure of student achievement – the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAPE – American students have improved substantially over the past 40 years. In general, the improvements have been greatest for African-American and Hispanic students, and among these, for the most disadvantaged.

The percentage of kids scoring “below basic” on the NAEP has plummeted in both reading and math in both fourth and eighth grade for every racial group except Native Americans. Average reading and math scores for each subgroup in the fourth and eighth grades have also climbed steadily.

On international assessments, American students’ performance in math and science has improved from the bottom to above international average. US students in schools with 10 percent or less poverty are number one in the world.

Students from low-poverty states like Massachusetts outscore most of their global peers. And almost half of all American high school students now head off to college each year, an all-time high.

The story of American education is actually about steady progress – slow, that’s true – but progress nevertheless.

Does this mean that there are no struggling schools in America? Of course not. Does this mean public schools universally work for every student? No.

But the rhetorical frame that public education is a failure is used to convince people the whole system is bad and that it’s collapse has been inevitable.

The way we fight back against this misleading rhetoric is to ask why are there broken schools and who broke them?

Education Is About Getting The Best For Your Child

These days, politicians like to talk about education like it’s a “competition” to get students over the bar or up to speed.

Terms like “college or career ready” and getting young children “ready to learn” all perpetuate the idea that the only purpose of education is to get individuals to a next stage or an end goal.

This rhetorical frame is used to convince people that once their own children are provided for then that’s all that matters.

It ignores that education is really about developing our societal capacity. We want all citizens educated so our whole society prospers.

That’s why early state constitutions in the U.S., like those of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, stressed the importance of a system of public schools. That’s why the Land Ordinance of 1785 provided for public school financing in new territories. And the earliest advocates for public schools – Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Horace Mann – all agreed that democratic citizenship was a primary function of education.

Turning our collective investment in education into a competition to get to the top ensures there will be winners and losers. Designing a school system that maximizes self-interest means only those who already have advantages get what they want.

Instead of telling parents their children need to be well educated so they can compete, we should say children need to be well educated so they can take part in a democratic society.

Money Should Follow The Child

This is a favorite of advocates for charter schools and vouchers that let parents transfer their children to private schools at taxpayer expense.

The idea has a gloss of sensibility to it because education budgets often come with per-pupil expenditures.

But the idea that the money should follow the child when students leave a public school for other options is a bad financial decision.

First, schools have what are called “stranded costs”. When a public school loses a percentage of students to charter schools or a voucher program, the school can’t reduce costs by an equivalent percent. The school still must pay the same utility, maintenance, transportation, and food services costs. The school must still carry the salary and benefit costs of administrative staff, custodial services, and cafeteria workers. The school may not be able to reduce teaching staff because the attrition will occur randomly across various grade levels, leaving class sizes only marginally reduced.

In Philadelphia for instance, a recent study found when a student leaves the school district for a charter school, the public system is left with nearly $5,000 in continuing costs. A study in Boston found the stranded cost is $7,000.

A research study of school districts in Michigan found that choice policies significantly contribute to the financial problems of Michigan’s most hard-pressed districts. When the percent of students attending charter schools approaches 20 percent, there are sizeable adverse impacts on district finances.

Because schools can’t reduce expenses incrementally, they cut support staff – such as a reading specialist or librarian. They cut courses – such as art and music. And the whole capacity of the school diminishes.

Further, students aren’t a “one-off” expense. The cost to educate each student varies a lot. Students with disabilities or who don’t speak English as their first language often cost significantly more to educate. So as a school loses students, it may often find itself left with a larger percentage of its highest-cost students.

Instead of saying money should follow the child, we should say children don’t come with a price tag, and that every school needs to have enough resources to meet the needs and interests of all its students.

Money Doesn’t Matter

How often do you hear the argument that we can’t fix the problems in schools by “throwing money at them.”

We constantly hear that schools are incredibly wasteful and they have to do better with the money they have.

Arne Duncan loved to call this “the new normal.”

It’s also just not true. Yes America does spend more money per student than most other industrialized countries. But remember, this is an average and there is incredibly wide variance in the system.

The richest 25 percent of school districts receive 15.6 percent more funds from state and local governments per student than the poorest 25 percent of school districts. That’s a national funding gap of $1,500 per student, on average, a gap that has grown 44 percent since 2001.

When spending has increased, about half of the increases, according to economist Richard Rothstein, come from serving students with disabilities and immigrant students who don’t speak English.

But in total, most states spend less money on education today than they did in 2008 – some of them a lot less. And national per-pupil spending has dropped 3 years in a row. In the meantime student populations continue to increase.

But does money even matter? Numerous studies say yes.

According to one of those studies by Rutgers University professor Bruce Baker, on average, higher per-pupil spending produces better results. School resources that cost money — like class size reduction or higher teacher salaries — tend to be positively associated with better student outcomes.

This is especially true with low-income students. One study found that a 20 percent increase in per-pupil spending had virtually closed the high school graduation gap between poor students and their wealthier peers and it got far more of those students into college.

So instead of talking about the need to “tighten our belts” and adjust to the “new normal” we need to talk about giving schools the resources that are necessary to address all their students’ needs and interests.

Schools Should Be Run Like A Business

How often do you hear people say, “If we ran a business the way we operate schools, it wouldn’t be in business very long”?

We’re told that education is too inefficient and not productive enough, that schools need to focus on “quality improvement” and “zero defects.”

We’re told that teachers resist change, that schools are a bureaucratic monopoly, and that more competition needs to be introduced into the system.

So now superintendents call themselves CEOs and parents are called customers.

This rhetoric distorts the mission of education.

First when people say run schools like a business, they don’t say what kind of business? Coal mines aren’t run like restaurants.

Second, most businesses fail. Do we really want schools that are constantly failing? How is that good for kids?

Third, you’ve all heard the Papa John’s tagline “Better Ingredients, Better Pizza.” Well, as Jamie Vollmer has pointed out, schools can’t control their ingredients. They have to educate all children with the resources they are given by the community.

Lastly, businesses are not democratic institutions. Schools must be democratic if we want parents and taxpayers to have input into how schools are run. And schools must model democracy if we want children to be prepared to function in a democratic society.

So instead of comparing schools to businesses, we should talk about schools as essential infrastructure, like fire and police protection, roads and bridges, and our electoral process.

Any School Getting Public Money Is A Public School

Yes, you heard that right.

According to school choice advocates, the public school system should give parents the option to choose from an array of school options, some of which aren’t truly public.

When a school choice pressure group recently descended on the capital of my home state North Carolina, they advocated for the state’s Virtual Academy, an online school run by private for-profit operator K12 Inc. Other “public school options” the group advocates for are “tax-credit funded scholarship programs” that help families pay for private school tuition.

Similarly, the Florida school choice advocacy group RefinED contends that school vouchers, which allow parents to transfer students to private schools at taxpayer expense, are part of a public school system.

The intent here is to make you believe that private online schools and voucher funded schools are public schools just because they get public money.

Anyone who has been paying attention to the growth of the charter school industry could see this coming from a long way off.

For years, charter school advocates have insisted on calling their schools public schools.

But charter schools fail the test for what constitutes a truly public institution in many ways:

Charter school buildings are often privately owned by the school founders, or by an affiliated company or private trust, even if the building was originally purchased with taxpayer money.

Sometimes, the materials, furniture, and equipment in the schools are owned by a private charter management company, and if the school closes, the charter “owner” may keep those assets, even though they were purchased with taxpayer money.

While most public schools are governed by democratically elected public boards, most charter schools are run by appointed boards who are not directly accountable to the community.

Unlike public schools, charters can define the number of enrollment slots they wish to make available. They do not have to take students mid-year and do not have to “backfill” seats, that is, accept students to fill open spots when students leave.

Generally, charter schools don’t have to follow the same due process rules for students and employees that public schools follow. They can set their own academic, behavior, and cultural standards regardless of community norms.

And while public schools are obligated to share information about their operations, charter schools have very narrow requirements for what information they report and can restrict public access.

Despite these obvious differences, the charter industry lobby has been very successful in convincing politicians and policy makers that their schools are public. And now the same sort of logic is being used to claim other private education operators are in fact public schools too.

Cornerstones Of Effective Communication

But none of these options – charter schools, voucher supported private schools, and online schools operated by private companies – are part of a truly public school system. They are instead, parallel school systems – each necessitating separate layers of bureaucracy and oversight and each siphoning money out of our public schools.

I can go through many more of these phrases that are used to dismantle the public education system. But what I want to leave you with today is some news about a new tool to help you wage this rhetorical war and also a bit of advice on how to plan your own messaging.

First, later this month, the Network for Public Education will debut a new online toolkit to help grassroots public school advocates deal effectively with the powerful advocacy groups who want to privatize our public schools. Part of what I shared with you today is included in this new tool because I helped write it. But the content goes into greater depth. I’m not able to share any samples with you today or give you a website to go to, but if you leave me your card, I’ll send you the website address when it becomes available.

And I’d truly be remiss if I didn’t close out with some advice on how to craft your own messages, at least based on what’s worked for me. It’s what I call a four-cornerstone approach:

Don’t address the audience. Address the reader.In the marketing and advertising industry, which I’ve been part of for over 30 years, successful campaigns are not about moving whole audiences. They’re focused on persuading tiny segments. Typical promotions expect to get very small percentages of response, often 1 percent or less. So when communicating about education, target your message to an individual, such as a parent who’s considering enrolling her child in a charter, a taxpayer who no longer has children in schools but cares how his money is being spent, or a local official who doesn’t want to be exposed for putting children at risk. When you narrow the scope of your message you’re far more apt to increase its impact.

Emotion is more persuasive than facts.Do I really need to explain this? Look who we elected president. In a standoff of emotions vs. facts, emotions win every time. Research studies have found that people generally make decisions mostly on emotions and use facts and reason to back their decisions up. The best way to generate emotion is to tell stories. Also, use metaphors, but be sure to pick ones based on good values. Arne Duncan wanted us to buy into a Race to the Top, which was a terrible metaphor.

Start where people are, not where you want them to be. This is not the same thing as compromise. But what you can do is create an idea or course of action which will lead to what you want in the long run. Those who want to dismantle public education have been masterful at this. They persuaded school supporters to accept standardized testing of schools so that once a school can be deemed a failure it can be punished and closed. They made it acceptable for politicians of all stripes to support charter schools, which now makes it easier to argue that any education provider getting taxpayer funds is part of the public school system. We need to build these kind of slippery slopes for our side.

Refine and repeat. You have to whittle down arguments into digestible chunks that you repeat over and over. People too often make the mistake that they have to be relevant to the latest headline or change the messaging because people might be getting bored with it. But staying on message has a snowball effect over time.

How My Mom’s Story Ends

Finally, speaking of stories, I need to tell you the end of mine.

After my dad died, my mom never remarried and gradually withdrew from many of the activities she had enjoyed. Far from the family she left behind in Montana, with two of her sons living on opposite ends of the continent, her third son whose business frequently took him out of town, and her aging friendships dwindling every year, she spent most days alone except for a home care nurse who came three days a week and sons who could visit on the weekends and holidays. Attempts to persuade her to move closer to her family up north or move closer to one of her sons were in vein.

After her fourth fall, we realized she had to be institutionalized in a nursing home.

When I would visit her in the home we would sit in her room and watch TV. Her favorite program was Fox News. During my visit, I would help her into her wheelchair and take her on a walk around the facility. Because residents were required to keep their doors open, as we wheeled through the corridors we could hear what others were watching. Nearly every TV was tuned to Fox News.

After two years in the home, my mom passed away quietly in her sleep one night.

As we were going through her things, we came across boxes of old photos. Some showed her with her classmates in their trim white nursing uniforms graduating from the University of Montana in Missoula.

There were photos from her years with the Nursing Corps too, showing her working with the trainees bound for the front. And we found phots of her in rank with the Corps, dressed in stately gray uniforms with epaulettes and caps, sometimes marching in holiday parades.

On the hunch these photographs had historical value, we sent them to a municipal museum in Missoula where they are now on public display for all to see.

Stay in the fight for our public schools by following our education project, the Education Opportunity Network.

This is a transcript of a presentation to grantees of

the Schott Foundation for Public Education