Tag: culture wars

Florida Schools Now Protecting Kids From Smut Like Sexy, Sexy ‘Paradise Lost’

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In exactly the sort of development you’d expect in the midst of a moral panic and censorship campaign, we learn this week that one Florida school district isn’t limiting itself to removing modern-day smut like sex ed or books about gay penguins. The Orlando Sentinel reports that, thanks to a new state law that requires the removal of any school materials for review as soon as someone files a complaint, books like A Room With A View, Madame Bovary, and even John Milton’s 1667 biblical fanfiction epic Paradise Lost have been pulled from Orange County Public Schools, at least until media specialists can check to make sure they’re not porn. Hell, even Ayn Rand has been censored, instead of allowing high schoolers to find out for themselves what a terrible writer and human she was.

The story notes that several works that have regularly been used in classes are on the rejected list, like The Color Purple,Catch-22,Brave New World, and The Kite Runner. Naturally, the district has also removed both The Bluest Eye and Beloved by Toni Morrison, who can’t seem to help herself terrifying white parents with books that are entirely too much about Black women how dare she.

Previously

Virginia Mom Begs Voters Not To Let Toni Morrison Kill More White Children With Words

100 Year Old Lady At Florida School Board Better Patriot Than All Book Banners Put Together

Ask The Gay Penguins How ‘Limited’ Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Law Is. YOU CAN’T THEY’RE BANNED

The district hasn’t yet finalized its lists of what books will be permanently banned or restricted to certain grade levels, and which will be allowed back into classrooms; the district’s “media specialists” are spending the whole summer reviewing every single book in classroom libraries to make sure children aren’t corrupted by mentions of sex, gay people, or Black people who don’t smile obligingly enough, we assume.

The Sentinel explains,

Some books rejected earlier this summer, among them “The Scarlet Letter” and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” have since been approved, according to the lists shared with the Orlando Sentinel by a district teacher and by an advocacy group that obtained a rejection list through a public records request. Other books have been approved but only for certain grades.

Four plays by William Shakespeare, including “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” are currently listed as approved for grades 10 through 12 only, as is Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” the lists show.

Fans of The Simpsons will recall that Streetcar! is a musical spectacular featuring the sexy, muscular Ned Flanders and the cheery closing number, “You Can Always Depend on the Kindness of Strangers (A Stranger’s Just a Friend you Haven’t Met).”

Many books are being rejected — temporarily or permanently — because for some reason there’s mention of sex, which Great Literature never mentions but smut like Othello does. The explanation listed for many titles on the rejected list is simply “Depicts or describes sexual conduct (not allowed per HB 1069-2023,” which Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed as part of his presidential campaign. Pretty cruel to have a censorship law with 69 in it, if you ask us.

The new law makes book challenges easier and, if the concern is sexual content, requires the books to be removed from the shelves within five days and remain inaccessible to students while being reviewed. Republican lawmakers said they passed it to make sure pornography and books that depict sexual activity are kept from children.

Mind you, there’s really not any porn in schools, and the law includes an apparently useless clause noting that even works with nudity or boinking can only be considered pornographic if they lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Of course, once there’s a complaint, that has to be determined by the school media specialists.

The Sentinel spoke to a teacher who said, “The last thing I would have expected to be rejected is Milton,” what with Paradise Lost being a “cornerstone of Western Literature” and all that. Yr Wonkette hasn’t looked at it since comparative lit in grad school (Dante and Chaucer are way more fun), but yeah, there are indeed sex scenes in Paradise Lost, including Adam and Eve Doing It before the Fall (and unmarried at that, because there’s no sin in the Garden) and after. Hope you’re ready for some hot fuck action:

Handed they went; and eased the putting off
Those troublesome disguises which we wear,
Straight side by side were laid; nor turned, I ween,
Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial love refused

They was NAKED. Then after the Fall they screw again, only lustfully. Yeah, yeah, we know, you’ll be in your bower.

The ninth grade teacher said he believes the new laws imply that “I have horrible intentions for my students,” when he simply wants to get kids excited about reading and understanding literature, and isn’t that always the excuse they give when they’re peddling smut like Kurt Vonnegut and Alice Walker and Edgar Allen Poe?

“We are in this because we really care about the stuff that we teach and really care about the content we get to introduce our students to,” he said.

If the rejected list doesn’t change, he said, he will have to remove novels like “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream” from his classroom bookshelves as they are rejected for all grades, as well as “Crime and Punishment” and “In Cold Blood,” which are now rejected for 9th grade, which he teaches.

Yeah, that Dostoevsky, what a creep. Another teacher said she was “gobsmacked” to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream rejected, even temporarily, and was downright angry at the rejection of works she had used in advanced placement classes, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, which like virtually all the books mentioned here has yet to be adapted into a porno.

She selects novels “to engage my students, to offer them literature that makes them think,” and some books meant to describe “the adolescent experience” contain sexual content. But they are not pornographic or inappropriate and it upset her to see them on the rejected list.

“It’s just so frustrating and disheartening,” she said.

You know, it’s almost as if writers think sex is an important aspect of human life and motivation, an essential part of literature, even. That’s what kids have to be protected from, for sure. Fahrenheit 451 had it right: Books just make people unhappy, so best we get rid of them.

[Orlando Sentinel / Image generated using DreamStudio AI and Photoshop]

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Cool TN Lady Gonna Fill The Social Studies Standards With Awesome Stuff Like ‘Barack Obama Did The Tornados’

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Education Wars just never go away, and in today’s dispatch from the front lines we’ll look at Tennessee, where a rightwing conspiracy theory fan and anti-Muslim bigot has just been appointed to the committee that sets standards for the state’s social studies curricula.

Yr Wonkette already introduced you last year to Laurie Cardoza-Moore, the nutball Tennessee bigot lady, when she was a member of the state textbook commission that was tasked with making sure only “age appropriate” materials were in them. You may recall that Tennessee was considering a measure that would have required state approval of every last item in the collections of school libraries; the bill’s sponsor charmingly said that any materials not approved by the commission should be burned. Ultimately, the Lege settled for a different plan that gave the textbook commission the power to hear appeals of book challenges brought by parents, so the state could ban library books even after a local school board had gone through a challenge process and approved them. Hooray for compromise.

We guess that Ms. Cardoza-Moore must have either done a bang-up job on that commission, or at the very least that she has powerful friends in Tennessee, because clearly it’s the latter thing. She was chosen for the Tennessee Standards Recommendation Committee by Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R), the slimebooger we came to know and loathe during the kangaroo court proceedings that expelled Democratic state Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson in April. Sexton also appointed her to the textbook commission in 2021, which is quite the coincidence.

In her new job, Cardoza-Moore will have a say in setting state standards for social studies classes, although we suspect she’ll just photocopy the course offerings at Hillsdale College and say “Done!” As Judd Legum points out in his Popular Information newsletter, Cardoza-Moore doesn’t actually believe in public schools; she’s homeschooled her own five kids, and she’s simply horrified that US history texts teach historical facts that make America look bad, such as the fact that the Constitution provided a framework for oppression of African Americans. In a 2020 Fox News interview, she blamed Common Core, because why not? She claimed, falsely, that schools no longer teach about the founding of the US, but instead skip ahead to the Civil War and Reconstruction so they can harp on all the slavery, those monsters.

“This is an outrage,” Cardoza-Moore exclaimed. “It poses the greatest national security threat to our constitutional republic.”

So yeah, she’s a real peach. She somehow also took issue with a textbook’s factual statement that the Republican Party was originally founded to fight the spread of slavery beyond the states where it was already allowed, complaining that it was “disinformation” because Lincoln was anti-slavery, which, yeah, that’s what the book said. She was mostly upset the book didn’t say that Democrats were pro-slavery and KKK, and also what about that Klansman Robert Byrd, huh?

Cardoza-Moore initially made her name in Tennessee politics by fearmongering about Islam, back when that was the thing the Right was certain would destroy America, because Barack Obama was president. She led some of the most paranoid opposition to a mosque being built in Murfreesboro, claiming that fully 30 percent of Muslims are terrorists and that the mosque would be a base for “radical Islamic extremists” bent on destroying Nashville’s Christian music industry.

During her 2021 confirmation hearing for her seat on the textbook commission, she explained that bad school textbooks are directly responsible for wrecking America and of course the riots that burned all cities in America to the ground in 2020, several of them more than once.

While America slept, the hearts, minds and souls of our students were being influenced by disinformation. Tragically we have seen the result over the past few months; our streets have been filled with rioting destructive American young people who have not been taught the values entrusted to us by our nation’s founders … nor have they been taught our nation’s history — history which many seem intent to destroy

See, if only kids been made to memorize more facts about how George Washington was a Christian and God wrote the Constitution, there might be a few more cities still standing in our great land.

As Legum details, Cardoza-Moore doesn’t seem to have met a conspiracy theory she didn’t glom on to. She’s said that 9/11 was an “inside job,” that Donald Trump was the true winner of the 2020 election, and that January 6 was a false flag attack by “Antifa.” I’m just disappointed that she doesn’t appear to have said anything about chemtrails. But she came kind of close in 2011, as Legum explains, when she

claimed that former President Barack Obama was causing “horrific tornadoes” because he made a speech that discussed the plight of Palestinians. Asked if she still held these views, Cardoza-Moore did not respond.

She also runs her very own “Christian Zionist” nonprofit called “Proclaiming Justice to the Nations,” which recently ran a press release on her appointment to the social studies standards job. In it, we learn that she has previously helped the Florida Department of Education screen textbooks, “a successful review effort that ‘caught and corrected dozens of books to prevent political indoctrination of Florida’s children,’ a spokesperson for Governor Ron DeSantis noted.”

In the press release, Cardoza-Moore reflected on the important task ahead of her, because

“The materials we will be reviewing can only accomplish the mission of educating good American citizens if our Tennessee textbooks are devoid of left-aligned historic revisionism and the toxic material found in the antisemitic Critical Race Theory; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; Social-Emotional Learning and Ethnic Studies.”

Impressive how she got all the rightwing shibboleths in there!

The statement also emphasized that Muslim groups opposed her appointment to the textbook commission, presumably because if she has the right enemies, that just shows what a great job she’ll do for Tennessee students.

We can hardly wait to see what happens to Tennessee social studies standards. Haha, we kid, of course, because we read the history standards that Donald Trump’s “1776 Commission” came up with, so we have a pretty good idea. Good luck, kids!

[Popular Information]

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#Cool #Lady #Gonna #Fill #Social #Studies #Standards #Awesome #Stuff #Barack #Obama #Tornados

‘Moms For Liberty’ Now Against Mother’s Day

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Someday when the current wave of ridiculous moral panics subsides (and is replaced by some other shiny new ridiculous moral panic), the rightwing astroturf book-banning group “Moms for Liberty” will have an entire wing devoted to it in the Museum Of Why We Can’t Have Nice Things. Since the group’s founding in 2021 — initially for the purpose of hounding one Florida woman who beat co-founder Tina Descovich in a Brevard County school board election — the Mad Moms have become fulltime combatants in the Culture Wars, seeking to ban books about the Civil Rights Movement because they accurately depicted white opponents of integration as bigots, challenging scores of books at a time so they’ll be pulled from shelves under Florida’s ban-first policy, and occasionally fantasizing about gunning down librarians who are luring children into reading books containing Wrongthink.

Previously!

ACHTUNG! TN Moms Have Found The Critical Race Theory, And It Is Ruby Bridges’ Children’s Book!

100 Year Old Lady At Florida School Board Better Patriot Than All Book Banners Put Together

‘Moms For Liberty’ Leader Wistfully Shares Dream Of Gunning Down Librarians

Naturally enough, a Tennessee chapter of the Moms For Purity has now declared victory against a Chattanooga school librarian who attempted to destroy America by proposing a Mother’s Day book presentation aimed at teaching that families come in all shapes, including families with one, two, or zero mommies. The Washington Post’sGreg Sargent (gift linky) explains:

Caroline Mickey, the librarian at Alpine Crest Elementary School outside Chattanooga, just learned this the hard way, when her idea for a Mother’s Day-themed lesson came under sudden and heavy fire from parents in the area. The vitriol of the attack, and the school district superintendent’s rapid decision to cancel her lesson in response, caught her off guard.

“It was overwhelming,” Mickey told me. “I didn’t realize it was going to be quite this intense.”

Ms. Mickey — already a suspicious character since she shares a name with a dangerous groomer mouse in Florida — sent a notice to parents that she had planned a pre-Mother’s lesson that would be “sensitive to the fact that not all students live with a mother” and that would “[celebrate] those who fill the motherly roles in our lives: those who make our lunches, who kiss away our hurts, and who teach us to fly.”

No, that’s not sweet, it’s indoctrination, because only REAL mothers can do that, and besides, I learned to fly from an FAA certified flight instructor; my mother wouldn’t know an aileron from a baguette.

Ms. Mickey planned to read two books aloud on the theme; Miriam B. Schiffer’s Stella Brings the Family, a tale of a little girl who’s worried about her school’s Mother’s Day party because she has two dads, and Ryan T. Higgins’s Mother Bruce, a goofy story about a grumpy bear whose Uber Eats order goes terribly wrong and is sent a bunch of goose eggs that aren’t boiled, but instead hatch, and so the goslings treat him as their momma. In the Wonkette Sekrit Chatcave, Rebecca said it’s a darling book, and Evan said he was pretty sure he’s known at least one bear named Bruce. “‘Why are these goddamned goslings following me?’ said Bruce, yeah sounds about right.”

The reaction from Moms for White Evangelical Nationalism — to the school activity, not to Evan — was swift and furious. On a local message board, one woman accused Mickey of trying to “erase motherhood on Mother’s Day,” explaining that only women are mothers, and if a man is a caregiver, he’s a father, and look what’s happening to our “once wonderful” local school with all this indoctrination! (She also took issue with the library website’s “Reading changes your life” slogan, because why is the library trying to change children, huh?)

The rant even got angry about the notice that parents could opt out if they wanted, because “Why are opted out students, whose parents believe in traditional family values, going to be moved to another location so as to not disturb the supposed feelings of others?” And will the alternative lesson plan teach the “biblical definition of gender,” or some other horror?

The piece closes, “Please pray for the children of Hamilton County. The schools are coming after their hearts” and for good measure cites that line from Luke about how anyone who would lead children astray should “have a millstone hung around his neck and to be thrown into the sea.”

The note was followed by a distraught statement from Tonya Dodd, the local Moms for Liberty chair, who insisted that both books wouldn’t even be fit for middle schoolers, let alone second graders, because of all that gay and gender and evildoing, and also the “Social Emotional Learning (Cultural Marxism).” Dodd warned the school board that “As elected officials, you know you are appointed by God and you should be doing everything you can to keep children safe in their learning environment,” which, if you want to be technical, is not how school board elections actually work.

For extra cluelessness points, the Mad Moms chair complains that the librarian could have instead chosen books to

represent women who are moms that may not have given birth to their children; such as, grandmothers, aunts, stepmoms, adoptive moms, or any women that may be a mom to a child.

Which is actually pretty much the point of Stella Brings the Family, in which Stella’s friend suggests she invite both dads, her Nona, her uncle, her aunt, and a cousin, and everyone has a fine time except for the one kid who stands up, calls them all heathens and groomers, and says the Proud Boys are his real mother. (I am not allowed to write children’s books.)

The Post reports that some loving Christian parents in the area sent Ms. Mickey “long rambling rants” in emails in which they declared her a “groomer” and a literal enemy of motherhood.

Worse, as the Tennessee Holler tweeted, Mickey’s superintendent, Justin Robertson, didn’t even make a token attempt to defend her, and instead apologized and cancelled the lesson. No word on whether the books have yet been pulled from the school library.

Following the publication of the WaPo story, Dodd, the Moms for Censorship chair, took to Twitter today to reflect on her “success” and how lots of mean people not even from Chattanooga thought they had any right to have an opinion on the matter, but thank goodness she and her supporters fought against the ugly attempt to erase motherhood.

“Keep on cloud seeding and geoengeneering and see what happens. It never fails we have clear nice days, then a day full of trails in the sky, then crazy weather.”

Mind you, that was several hours after a middle-of-the night reply to a local TV weather report in which Dodd suggested that chemtrails are causing “crazy weather,” so thank goodness we have very calm normal people influencing what’s taught in schools.

OPEN THREAD.

[Washington Post (gift link) / Vice News / Chattanoogan]

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100 Year Old Lady At Florida School Board Better Patriot Than All Book Banners Put Together

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Earlier this month, the school district in Martin County, Florida, purged at least 84 books from school libraries after complaints from the head of the local Moms for “Liberty” chapter under the state’s school censorship law, HB 1467, passed last year. PEN America notes that most of the books were removed following challenges by a single objector, “who filed forms indicating that she did not actually read any of the books in question.” No problem; in keeping with the law, a DeSanctified “media specialist” in the district reviewed the books, or at least the list, and the books were gone.

Among the familiar suspects like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved,the banned books also included 20 by a single author, Jodi Picoult, who writes novels for the young adult market. Picoult notes in an op-ed that the complaints — again, all from the one Moms for Censorship lady — inaccurately described all her books as “adult romance that should not be on school shelves.” Picoult, who we suspect knows her books better than the mom who didn’t read them, points out that most of the books that were targeted “do not even have a kiss in them.,” but they do deal with social issues that make rightwingers sad, and they “encourage kids to think for themselves.” Can’t have that.

Picoult also notes that one of her books marked for culling was The Storyteller, a novel about the repercussions of the Holocaust.

It chronicles the growth of anti-Semitism and fascism in Nazi Germany. There was a strange irony that a parent wanted this particular book removed, because it felt a bit like history repeating itself.

Julie Marshall, the Mom for Purity who lodged the complaints, told the Washington Post by email, “At this point, we believe we have challenged the most obscene and age inappropriate books,” but didn’t specify what her issues with The Storyteller were. Apparently there’s sex, including depictions of Nazi guards committing sexual assault, so maybe we wouldn’t want kids thinking Nazis were rapists.

The removal of all those books meant that Tuesday night’s Martin County school board meeting was packed, with about 200 people there. Many of the 40 who spoke at the meeting called for the books to be restored, although a few also worried about all the nasty sex in books available to high school readers, giving the very laziest local news stations an excuse to present one quote from each side and call it good coverage.

Marshall was there, in a Wonder Woman T-shirt, to explain that while she filed almost all the complaints, she works with many many concerned parents both locally and nationwide, and sadly she didn’t actually say “There are dozens of us! Dozens!” But she did say

“If you guys want to continue making me out to be the sole parent in all of this and give me the power that I can have all these books removed and make me out to be Wonder Woman, so be it … Persecute me for standing on morality, I really don’t care.”

We really do hope someone lets her know that Wonder Woman is a queer icon, that Lynda Carter thinks bigots suck, and that the character was created in the first place by William Moulton Marston, who lived very happily in a throuple and deliberately included a LOT of bondage references in the comic, what with that Lasso o’ Truth and all. (He was also a lie-detector crank who always looked for a way to cash in on his dubious inventions, so there’s that.) Marston included this illustration, by Harry G. Peter, of what a real Wonder Woman believes, in his article “Why 100,000 Americans Read Comics” in American Scholar (1943-44):

Image: Harvard College Library via NPR

Happily, among the many folks calling for freedom to read, there was a real wonder woman at the school board meeting, 100-year-old Grace Linn, who knows far too well why fascism has to be nipped in the bud whenever it arises. Her husband was killed in action fighting them in WW II, and by god she’s not going to allow any book burners in her America, thank you very much.

Linn brought along a quilt she had made to honor books and ideas that the current round of fascists are trying to snuff out; in January, as America’s censorship crusade was well under way, she had shared a photo of her quilt with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi for his show’s “Banned Book Club” feature.

The quilt includes censored titles like Beloved,Maus, Fahrenheit 451, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gender Queer, Two Boys Kissing, and more. Linn told Palm Beach TV station WPTV — one of the non-lazy ones! — “When I showed this to adult women, they’ll say, ‘Oh, no they didn’t do that to The Color Purple.‘”

Now, let’s get out of her way and listen:

A few highlights (full transcript of Linn’s remarks at AlterNet):

Good afternoon folks. I am Grace Lynn. I am a hundred years young. I’m here to protest our school district’s book-banning policy. My husband Robert Nichol was killed in action in World War II, at a very young age, he was only 26, defending our democracy, Constitution, and freedoms.

One of the freedoms that the Nazis crushed was the freedom to read the books they banned. They stopped the free press, banned and burned books. The freedom to read, which is protected by the First Amendment, is our essential right and duty of our democracy. Even so, it is continually under attack by both the public and private groups who think they hold the truth.

Linn noted she’d made the quilt last year in reply to the Right’s mania for book banning, and urged her fellow citizens not to knuckle under to today’s fascists, who seek power by trying to make us afraid of other Americans:

Banned books, and burning books, are the same. Both are done for the same reason: fear of knowledge. Fear is not freedom. Fear is not liberty. Fear is control. My husband died as a father of freedom. I am a mother of liberty. Banned books need to be proudly displayed and protected from school boards like this. Thank you very much. Thank you.

And that’s what we all need to be saying at every school and library board meeting in America, the end.

UPDATE: Well silly me, I didn’t include anything about the school board’s reactions to the two hours of public comment. According to the local paper, the board didn’t take any action on the banned books at Tuesday’s meeting, and no board members responded to the comments.

[PEN America / Daily Beast / WaPo / JTA / NPR / AlterNet / TC Palm]

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Proposed Florida Textbooks Won’t Say Why Rosa Parks Stayed Seated. Maybe She Was Stubborn, Who Knows?

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Now that Ron DeSantis has scrubbed all the woke out of Florida math textbooks, it’s time for the state’s social studies textbooks to be winnowed, so that no traces of critical race theory remains, and so no children feel guilty or sad about history. The New York Times reports (gift link) that as part of the periodic review of textbooks this year,

a small army of state experts, teachers, parents and political activists have combed thousands of pages of text — not only evaluating academic content, but also flagging anything that could hint, for instance, at critical race theory.

Remember, of course, that while in academia, critical race theory is a graduate-level topic of study, on the right, CRT means anything that makes white people fretting about The Blacks uncomfortable.

One group involved in the effort, the Florida Citizens Alliance, determined that 29 of the 38 textbooks its volunteers examined were simply inappropriate for use in Florida, and urged the Florida Department of Education to reject them. The Times notes that the group’s co-founders helped out with education policy during DeSantis’s transition (to governor, not in a trans kind of way, heavens!), and that it has “helped lead a sweeping effort to remove school library books deemed as inappropriate, including many with L.G.B.T.Q. characters.”

We bet the books they rejected were just full of critical racecars and critical footraces! Just how bad were these awful textbooks?

In a summary of its findings submitted to the state last month, the group complained that a McGraw Hill fifth-grade textbook, for example, mentioned slavery 189 times within a few chapters alone. Another objection: An eighth-grade book gave outsize attention to the “negative side” of the treatment of Native Americans, while failing to give a fuller account of their own acts of violence, such as the Jamestown Massacre of 1622, in which Powhatan warriors killed more than 300 English colonists.

Good call, because while Native Americans may have been genocided by disease — and later by US federal policy — some fought back, and that evens everything out.

Hilariously, the Times also notes that that the White Citizens Council Florida Citizens Alliance is “pushing the state to add curriculum from Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in Michigan that is active in conservative politics.” There’s just one little problem, though, because what Hillsdale offers for K-12 history and civics isn’t in any sense a “textbook,” but instead a set of guidelines for teachers, with recommended primary readings like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and probably Rush Limbaugh’s awful children’s books (we’re guessing on that one). But it’s from Hillsdale so that’s what the kids need.

The Times simply notes that “The curriculum was not included in Florida’s official review, and the state did not comment on the group’s recommendations.”

Moar Here!

Rush Limbaugh’s Crappy Books Will Save Kids From A.P. History

Biden Just Deleted The Stupid Ahistorical Bullsh*ts Of T—p’s ‘1776 Commission Report‘

Florida Takes Its Turn On ‘Please Don’t Make White People Uncomfortable’ Bandwagon

Ask The Gay Penguins How ‘Limited’ Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Law Is. YOU CAN’T THEY’RE BANNED

Florida’s Education Department actually does require that schools teach Black history, although how exactly that’s supposed to be done in a way that won’t upset any hypervigilant rightwing parents isn’t entirely clear. The Times says the department

emphasized that the requirements were recently expanded, including to ensure students understood “the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on individual freedoms.”

As we all know, slavery and Jim Crow were bad because they were regrettable departures from America’s founding ideas of freedom and equality, which were always the norm except in certain unfortunate moments (from 1619 through 1965 and elsewhere).

In a very sad attempt to win favor with Florida, an outfit called “Studies Weekly,” a minor-league publisher of weekly social-studies pamphlets mostly for early elementary grades, attempted to completely remove race from its first-grade lessons on Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. That took some doing!

The absolutely essential progressive parent group the Florida Freedom to Read Project provided the Times with three different versions of Studies Weekly’s very brief lessons on Parks. The first is currently used in Florida schools, and is pretty accurate:

“In 1955, Rosa Parks broke the law. In her city, the law said African Americans had to give up their seats on the bus if a white person wanted to sit down. She would not give up her seat. The police came and took her to jail.”

There were also two versions created for the new textbook review; the Times points out it’s not clear which one the company submitted, and as it turns out, Studies Weekly was rejected because it messed up its paperwork, so we’ll never know what the Florida Department of Education thought of the Rosa Parks lessons.

One version mentions race only indirectly:

“Rosa Parks showed courage. One day, she rode the bus. She was told to move to a different seat because of the color of her skin. She did not. She did what she believed was right.”

Another version eliminates race altogether, making it really unclear whether Parks was a hero or just kind of a jerk.

“Rosa Parks showed courage. One day, she rode the bus. She was told to move to a different seat. She did not. She did what she believed was right.”

It’s really something of a wonder that there wasn’t a third revision that simply said “Rosa Parks showed courage. She rode a bus. Good for her! Buses are big and scary!”

A fourth-grade lesson about discrimination following the Civil War and Reconstruction had similarly bizarre edits. In the initial version, the lesson explained that even after the war, many people in former Confederate states “believed African-Americans should be enslaved” and that they were “not equal to anyone in their community.” (Yes, that’s already problematic since it suggests white is the norm, but oh my, it gets very much worse.)

That got revised to the far weirder observation that “many communities in the South held on to former belief systems that some people should have more rights than others in their community.”

And where the initial discussion of Southern “Black Codes” made very clear that African Americans were regularly denied their basic rights, the second version still uses the term “Black Codes,” but says only that it became “a crime for men of certain groups to be unemployed” and that “certain groups of people” were prevented from serving on juries. Sounds like members of those certain groups were treated like they were particular individuals.

For the little it’s worth, the Times also adds that

The Florida Department of Education suggested that Studies Weekly had overreached. Any publisher that “avoids the topic of race when teaching the Civil Rights movement, slavery, segregation, etc. would not be adhering to Florida law,” the department said in a statement.

The story also notes that it’s not clear yet whether other publishers attempted similar decolorization; to find out, we may have to wait until Florida announces the textbooks that passed muster.

Until then, we’ll just have to hope none of the textbooks explain that the Voting Rights Act was passed after John Lewis and a certain group of his friends took a leisurely Sunday stroll across a bridge.

[NYT (gift link)]

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Red States About Five Minutes Away From Legalized Lynching Of Trans People

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The rightwing war on transgender Americans keeps advancing through red state legislatures, and among the more notable developments is that, as many warned, the bigots who want trans people to disappear have moved, in many states, from banning gender affirming care for minors to attempting to ban or severely restrict healthcare for trans adults as well. It’s just getting uglier and uglier, as Republican legislators compete to see who can use the power of state government to most creatively make trans people’s lives worse.

The bigoted legislation is being spewed like a firehose of hate across the country, and it can be difficult to keep track of. Fortunately, the ACLU and the Equality Federation both have online bill trackers if you want to see what horrible ideas are being floated in your state.

But holy Crom Jebus Bodhisattva Hank Gritt Galactus, these bastards are busy working to genocide trans people by limiting their access to medical care, all the while lying about wanting to “protect” children.

Forget that lie: It’s about making trans people of all ages suffer for the sin of existing.

A quick review of the ongoing madness, in no particular order:

Mississippi

Gov. Tate Reeves signed a bill Wednesday outlawing gender-affirming treatment — puberty blockers, hormone therapy, or surgery — for anyone under 18. That makes Mississippi the seventh state to ban such care for minors, after Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, South Dakota, and Utah. The bans in Alabama and Arkansas have been blocked in federal court, and we assume the lawsuits against Mississippi’s ban — all the others — will soon be flying too. [ABC News]

It’s worth noting up front here that genital surgery for minors is extremely rare. Top surgery (mastectomy) for patients under 18 is only slightly more common; in one of its trans panic articles, the New York Times noted there are no official stats, but that 11 leading pediatric clinics in the US reported 203 procedures on minors in 2021; it’s also not something that anyone just rushes into. State laws vary, but nearly all minor patients get extensive counseling and need at least one parent’s permission. [NYT]

North Dakota

A raft of anti-trans bills is moving through the state Legislature, including a ban on gender-affirming treatment, with possible prison sentences and/or heavy fines for healthcare providers who provide such care. Another bill would prohibit changing birth certificates “due to a gender identity change,” unless it’s to correct a clerical error. People who have had genital surgery could change their birth certificates with proof from a medical professional, which is already the state’s standard.

Still another would “define ‘father,’ ‘female,’ ‘mother,’ ‘male’ and ‘sex,’ and would mandate school districts and vital statistics agencies identify people based solely on their sex assigned at birth,” with no exceptions. The state Senate passed a bill requiring parental permission for K-12 teachers to use trans kids’ preferred pronouns. And the state House also passed two separate bans on trans athletes in girls’ and women’s sports (one for public schools, one for colleges and universities), although there have been no complaints from athletes anywhere in the state. [Advocate]

Tennessee

Last week, the Legislature passed a ban on gender-affirming care for minors; the vote in the House was disgustingly lopsided, 77-16, with three Democrats even joining in on bashing trans kids. Gov. Bill Lee signed it yesterday, making Tennessee Number Eight in the nation, along with that stupid ban on drag shows (Wonk link), which purportedly harm The Children.

As always, the bill sponsors insist they want to “protect” kids from being who they are. 97.5 percent of adolescents who come out as trans continue to identify as trans or nonbinary after five years, but the bill’s sponsors pushed the lie that once kids get through puberty, they give up on that trans nonsense and settle down.

As with similar bills, Tennessee’s subjects healthcare providers to criminal penalties for treating trans youth, but the bill includes this bizarre exception: Doctors would be allowed to continue treating patients who began treatment before the bill’s effective date of July 1 this year, but would have to end all treatment by March 31, 2024. Hooray, you have a year to leave the state before your transition is cut off, kids. Shortly after Gov. Lee signed it, the ACLU announced it will sue to block the law from going into effect. [CBS News / AP / Pink News]

Tennessee has even worse legislation on the way, too. HB1215, currently making its way through the state House, would prohibit private managed care companies from contracting with the state’s Medicaid alternative, TennCare, if they provide any gender-affirming health services at all, even for adults. To be clear, this isn’t just a ban on gender affirming care for Medicaid patients in Tennessee: It would ban insurers from contracting with TennCare if they offer such care anywhere in the US.

Even though the federal government covers the majority of Medicaid, state Rep. Tim Rudd (R) explained that the bill was absolutely necessary to make sure Tennessee taxpayers’ dollars don’t fund transgender care in other states. Presumably Rs will now ban the sales of car brands in the state if the manufacturers allow vehicles to be sold to trans people anywhere. [Tennessee HB1215 / AP]

Oklahoma

On Tuesday, the Oklahoma House passed its version of a ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth and sent it to the state Senate. The bill includes a special extra Secret Sauce ban on insurance coverage for gender-affirming care — not only for minors, but for adults, too.

The bill’s author, Rep. Kevin West (R), was very proud of his work, claiming that the bill would “protect children and parents from being pressured into agreeing to harmful experimental transition procedures…” although gender affirming care is not “experimental” — at the risk of a tautology, it’s often covered by insurance, and insurance companies don’t cover experimental treatments. And that line about saving kids and parents from being “pressured” — a word that isn’t in the bill text — is a marvelously dishonest construction. Heavens, no one would ever want gender-affirming care; it’s simply that every trans person everywhere was brainwashed.

The Washington Post notes that another bill, SB 129, would go even farther, banning gender-affirming treatment up to the age of 26. The bill was originally titled the “Millstone Act,” a reference to the Biblical injunction that anyone who harms a child should “have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” The title was stripped out Wednesday, apparently in recognition that Oklahoma is landlocked and the penalty would be impractical. [Oklahoman / WaPo]

Kentucky

In an attempt to outdo all the other anti-trans legislation in the country, Kentucky Republicans in late February introduced HB 470, which independent journalist Erin Reed says “takes nearly every anti-trans youth bill from nearly every state in 2023 and combines them all into one single cruel piece of legislation. It then adds wrinkles not seen in any other state.”

It has all the expected bans on lifesaving gender-affirming medical care for anyone under the age of 18, but would go even farther: It would ban Medicaid coverage, end all public funding for trans youth care, and even investigate doctors and revoke their licenses if they provide gender-affirming care to youth. But there’s even more, as Reed details:

one section would require schools to disclose transgender students’ information to their parents, and another section would ban gender marker changes for transgender youths. A unique provision in this bill would also prohibit legal name changes for youth, but only if the name change is for “gender transition purposes.”

An amended version of the bill passed out of committee and went to the full House for debate (and — spoiler — passage) yesterday. Protesters chanted “Shame! Shame!” as the committee members headed to the House chamber.

The amended version of the bill stripped out a provision that would have been a whole new front in the war on care for trans youth, by banning counseling aimed at helping kids with social transition. Apparently the Rs decided it would be too difficult to enforce, or to defend in court — who knows, really?

The now-deleted provision would have effectively forced all mental health providers to enforce cisgender identity on trans youth, by banning “social transition services,” which the bill had defined as

any encouragement, advocacy, or affirmation including pronouns, affirming a name change, and affirming “sex specific behaviors that vary from those typically associated with a person’s sex.” It then states that mental health counselors are banned from any of this and by doing so, they could lose their licenses.

Eliminating that provision doesn’t make the bill any better; it still includes all the other cruelty, including the non-counseling portions of the ban on social transition, like changing the gender marker on official documents and the prohibition on changing a minor’s name for “gender transition purposes.” Kentucky may have stripped it from the bill for now, but look for future bills that will take the plunge and ban social transition counseling. There’s no reason to think there’s any bottom to the war on trans people.

HB 470 was passed and sent on to the state Senate yesterday. [Kentucky HB 470 / Erin in the Morning]

[Image: Ted Eytan, Creative CommonsLicense 2.0]

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Woke NTSB Says ‘Overheated Wheel Bearing’ Derailed Train, Doesn’t Even Call Secretary Mayor Pete Gay

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a preliminary report yesterday on its investigation into the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The report says the train’s crew knew one car on the train had a badly overheated wheel bearing, and had already begun slowing the train just before the derailment.

Weirdly, the NTSB didn’t place any of the blame for the February 3 crash or the subsequent toxic chemical spill on President Joe Biden, Transportation Secretary Mayor Pete Buttigieg, or on transgender kids in American schools forcing others to acknowledge their preferred pronouns. That’s sure to come up on Newsmax.

Buttigieg was in East Palestine himself yesterday, where he didn’t buy McDonald’s hamburgers for anyone, unlike Donald Trump, who was there the day before and personally fixed everything. While Buttigieg was there, he acknowledged the rightwing media complaints that he hadn’t personally visited the site sooner, saying he’d “do some thinking” on whether he should have gone sooner. Oh for your sake, Pete! You really do over-intellectualize things a bit, but that’s how you do:

“What I tried to do was balance two things — my desire to be involved and engaged in on the ground, which is how I am generally wired to act and my desire to follow the norm of transportation secretaries allowing NTSB to really lead the initial stages of the public facing work,” he told reporters. “I’ll do some thinking about whether I got that balance right. But I think the most important thing is, first of all, making sure that the residents here have what they need.”

For all his introspection, Buttigieg got a Fox News story headlining how he’d gone on MSNBC last night and cruelly pointed out Donald Trump’s rollback of safety regulations, what a monster. Fox News also ran a fun story rounding up rightwingers on Twiitter mocking the “leather dress shoes” Buttigieg had worn, because what real man goes to a muddy disaster site in anything but steel-toed work boots?

So there’s your payback for the liberal media making fun of Ron DeSantis’s weird white hurricane boots, haw haw. Maybe Pete left his high heels in the car, replied one wag, because you know he is an effete gay homosexual who never wore boots, certainly not during his combat tour in Afghanistan. That’s him, second on the left, in a campaign photo. Those look like boots!

Jesus, you see how easy it is to get sucked into this stupid performative macho shit? Anyway, if Buttigieg had worn gnarly steel-toed work boots, wingnut media would have accused him of fakery because does he really wear Thorogood American Heritage steel-toed work boots around his soft office job? He does not, and how dare he spend $250 on boots just for a photo op? Damn him to hell!

So yes, the NTSB report.

Among the top findings were that the train crew appears to have acted appropriately; the train was traveling 47 miles per hour, a bit below the maximum speed for that area of 50 miles per hour. It was already slowing a bit when automated trackside monitoring equipment detected that a wheel bearing on the twenty-third car of the train was dangerously hot, 253°F above the ambient temperature of 10°F. (When car 23 passed two earlier detectors, they picked up temperatures that were rising, but well below the temperature threshold that would trigger an alarm.)

The detection equipment “transmitted a critical audible alarm message instructing the crew to slow and stop the train to inspect a hot axle,” and the engineer began slowing the train down, but then “an automatic emergency brake application initiated,” which Axios explains may have resulted from train cars separating from each other.

Once the train stopped, the crew “observed fire and smoke and notified the Cleveland East dispatcher of a possible derailment,” and with permission from the dispatcher, set the hand brakes on the first two cars and uncoupled the locomotives to move them a mile away for safety. The report does not note whether the train crew said “Whew!”

Thirty-eight cars of the 149-car train derailed; among them were 11 tank cars carrying hazardous chemicals. Fire broke out and also damaged 12 cars on the train that hadn’t derailed.

Axios notes that first responders who arrived on the scene got the initial fire under control, but Ohio authorities were concerned about five derailed tank cars carrying vinyl chloride, a carcinogenic chemical used in making PVC plastic. Temperatures inside one of the cars kept rising, “suggesting the chemical was undergoing a polymerization reaction and could explode.”

That prompted local responders on February 6 to evacuate a larger area around the crash site, then vent the five cars and burn off the chemicals, which took several hours. The NTSB report is careful to point out that the agency wasn’t involved in that decision, or in testing air and water quality following the crash. Please take your questions to the EPA and to Ohio GOP Governor Mike DeWine, who authorized the chemical burnoff after advisers warned him of the high risk of an explosion. (OK, fine, the NTSB didn’t specify DeWine, just that it wasn’t the feds’ decision.)

The NTSB will focus its ongoing investigation on:

[T]he wheelset and bearing; tank car design and derailment damage; a review of the accident response, including the venting and burning of the vinyl chloride; railcar design and maintenance procedures and practices; NS [Norfolk Southern] use of wayside defect detectors; and NS railcar inspection practices.

We should also point out that nowhere in the report does the NTSB examine the crucial railroad safety thoughts of Donald Trump Jr., who on Wednesday night went on Newsmax to explain that nobody in the Biden administration knows what they’re doing because Pete Buttiieg is gay and that was his only job qualification.

The son of the former president, who has never held a real job outside his daddy’s business/crime organization (or gigs in rightwing media resulting from that nepo baby status), claimed Joe Biden “doesn’t give a crap” and “couldn’t care less” about the people of East Palestine. You know, unlike his father, master of empathy Donald “have a good time” Trump.

Then it was time for the full-on gay-hatin’.

Newsmax host Carl Higbie started Junior off with the sage observation that “You know, Pete has no business in that position,” and the failson was off and running:

But, you know, he’s the guy who had no business running for president but they let him do that cause he was gay and they check off a box and then he didn’t win, so “he’s the gay guy, so we gotta give him something, let’s make him transportation secretary,” what does he know about it? NOTHING! His failure, after failure, after failure are truly affecting the American people.

Just to make clear that Buttigieg is a feminine not-man, Junior also came back to the rightwing meme about Buttigieg’s paternity leave after adopting twin babies, mocking “the time he spent chest-feeding while we were in the midst of a supply chain crisis.” Haha, can you just imagine that little unmanly wimp trying to feed a baby?!

MORE: How Donald Trump’s Sociopathic Parenting Made Donald Trump Jr. The Winner He Is Today

As we all know, real men subject their children to emotional abuse so they’ll learn how to be manly, and that’s why the train crashed, the end.

[NTSB / Axios / NYDN / Insider]

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Tom Nichols wrote whole thread about how ‘East Jesus’ red staters are obsessed with people like him

Post By Politics , , , , ,

According to our records, we haven’t done a post about Tom Nichols in just over two months. And, frankly, we’re starting to miss him. Or at least we’re starting to miss kicking him around.

So let’s check on him and see what he’s up to these days. Something expert-y? You bet your boots, it is!

This time, it looks like it’s GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s dumb “national divorce” tweet that got his creative juices flowing:

Greene’s tweet got Tom to thinking about rage in the red states, and he decided to do a whole thread on the subject:

“As I explain in my last book.” This will not be the last time in Tom’s thread that you hear about his last book.

“East Jesus Pancake House” is definitely a line worthy of an Area Expert™ like Tom Nichols. He never disappoints.

Eh, not that similar … after all, Tom Nichols is better than you. Don’t forget that, you red-state rubes.

And if you’d like to hear more of Tom’s thoughts about how the people of East Jesus who feel overlooked and dismissed by the dominant liberal culture are just obsessed with blue states, be sure to read his book:

That was quite a thread, wasn’t it?

Now let’s talk about how stupid and embarrassing and projection-y it was.

“Could make a black hole choke.” See now, Tom, that’s a good line.

Tom wrote a whole thread about how people in East Jesus, USA, are obsessed with people like him, because Tom doesn’t care what people in East Jesus, USA, think.

Tom is not going to be winning any prizes for self-awareness anytime soon.

Just perfect.

***

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Sunday Shows: Post-State Of The Union Rundown

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We’ve had a lot of fun since liveblogging President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. We’ve mocked the official unhinged Republican response,the public ritualistic humiliation of Rick Scott and Mike Lee, as well as the crazy lengths that Tucker Carlson has gone to save the GOP’s face.

The Republicans who appeared on the Sunday shows continued flailing and set themselves up for more mockery. Let’s watch!

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

On CNN’s “State Of The Union” with Jake Tapper, Chairman of the Intelligence Committee Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio was all to eager to prove us correct when we pointed out Republicans’ bad-faith criticism of the “Chinese Balloon Crisis” last week.

youtu.be

When Tapper asked about the two flying objects shot down this week over Canada and Alaska, Turner made it clear Republicans have no issue with political inconsistency.

TURNER: Yes, well, I certainly don’t know, as the administration is saying they don’t know. They do appear somewhat trigger-happy, although this is certainly preferable to the permissive environment that they showed when the Chinese spy balloon was coming over some of our most sensitive sites.

“Trigger-happy”?! After all their whining and posturing about shooting at the sky, they have the gall to now act like the Biden Administration is paranoid or “trigger-happy”? Turner, when asked about the discovery of further classified documents on a laptop and thumb drive belonging to a Trump aide, topped his hypocrisy with an extra helping of good ole’ whataboutism.

TURNER: […] They are not to be taken lightly. And we’re just amazed as people keep finding them stuffed in the strangest places like behind Biden’s Corvette. This is —this is clearly a failure of an understanding of how to handle the importance of these documents.

This lack of unseriousness and blatant partisanship is what we have to expect for the next two years.

We Aren’t Cutting Social Security, Just Taking It To A Nice Farm Upstate

Rep. Turner was followed on “State Of The Union” by Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, who wanted to make sure that Biden was wrong about Republicans’ intentions regarding Social Security.

youtu.be

ROUNDS: […] I think that’s misleading in terms of what he really intended to do. But, look, the bottom line is, is, Republicans want to see Social Security be successful and be improved. […]

Well, you know what, maybe Biden was wrong and Republicans’ intentions are noble, regardless of Rick Scott or Mike Lee. So, what is the senator’s great plan to improve Social Security and make it more successful?

ROUNDS: […] I kind of look at security the way I would at the Department of Defense and our defense spending. We’re never going to not fund defense. But, at the same time, we — every single year, we look at how we can make it better. […]

So Republicans want to fund Social Security on a year-by-year basis?! I’m sure a lot of the seniors reliant on those benefits will be happy to know they’d be dependent on the Republican Party’s political games and whims every year.

I guess a cut by any other name would still make Scott’s shriveled heart flutter.

Influence Peddling Is Bad … Unless It’s Jared Kushner

Over on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos, Chairman of the Oversight Committee Rep. James Comer assured everyone that his committee will take the buying of influence very seriously.

COMER: Now I don’t disagree with the Democrats and their criticism of the previous administration. We have a problem here that needs a legislative solution. That’s why this Biden investigation is so important. There’s a legislative solution to this, and it can be bipartisan. The Democrats complained about Kushner’s foreign dealings. Republicans are certainly complaining about the entire Biden family’s foreign business dealings.

But when Stephanopoulos pushed Comer on why it seems that they’re taking no actions on Kushner or the Trumps (other than lip service), Comer made it clear that his committee is just weaponizing the government for partisanship. Again.

COMER: […] The difference between Jared Kushner and Hunter Biden is that Jared Kushner actually sat down [and] was interviewed. He was interviewed by investigators. So he’s already been investigated. […]

Thankfully, Stephanopoulos did a final fact-check before Comer slimed out the door.

STEPHANOPOULOS: […] I think we only learned of the $2 billion Saudi investment from the Washington Post this morning, at least the details of it.

Unless James Comer’s committee is full of Minority Report pre-crime investigators, it is pretty clear that the congressman’s full of shit.

The Real Meaning of “Woke”

We end with New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu on CBS’s “Face The Nation” with Margaret Brennan.

youtu.be

When asked about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s ongoing culture war against Disney, Sununu tried to describe his opposition to “woke cancel culture.” Brennan asked for a simple explanation of whatever Sununu meant by “woke,” and he quickly descended into gobbledygook.

SUNUNU: It’s the … it’s the divisiveness … divisiveness […] Where it is me versus you. Whereas if you are not adhering to my ideals, then I’m going to cancel you out. It is us versus them. It is this binary, where everything’s a war. […]

Oh! Guess by that logic we can start counting Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, January 6th insurrectionists, and Ron DeSantis as “woke.”

However, Sununu successfully demonstrated that “woke” and “cancel culture” are right-wing dog whistles that, like “critical race theory,” they can’t coherently describe. Despite his efforts at distancing himself from other Republicans, he also proved our theory that “good Republicans” are not a thing. It is the media’s attempt at “fetch.”

Have a week.

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Civil Rights Lawyer Ben Crump Might Take Ron DeSantis To AP ‘Sue Your Ass’ Class Over Black History Course

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is getting significant pushback for his administration’s rejection last week of an Advanced Placement course in African American studies. Yesterday, African American state lawmakers, educators, and others rallied in the Florida Capitol in Tallahassee to call for the AP course to be offered in Florida high schools. Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump said at the rally that if DeSantis refuses to make the class available, Crump will sue the state on the behalf of three high school honors students from Leon County who want to take the course.

“If the governor allows the College Board to present AP African American studies in classrooms across the state of Florida, then we will feel no need to file this historic lawsuit,” Crump told reporters at the Capitol. “However, if he rejects the free flow of ideas and suppresses African American studies, then we’re prepared to take this controversy all the way to the United States Supreme Court.”

It’s just the latest effort to fight back against DeSantis’s ongoing agenda of using culture war issues to build rightwing support nationwide as he plans a likely 2024 presidential run. DeSantis has claimed that the AP course, currently being taught as a pilot before being rolled out nationwide, is tainted by unnecessary political elements like queer theory, because no Black people have ever been LGBTQ as long as you exclude Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, and others who were not Martin Luther King, the only Black leader DeSantis pretends to admire.

DeSantis and his Education Department also cried bitterly about how the AP course was full of “critical race theory” because it might suggest that slavery, Jim Crow, and systematic racism were part of a deliberate attempt by white people to deny rights and economic freedom to people of color, which could make white children feel sad. Instead, under Florida law, we’re pretty sure Black history is limited to half of one sentence from King’s “Dream” speech, as well as a brief list of Black entertainers, athletes, Supreme Court justices who were not Thurgood Marshall, and the opening credits of “The Cosby Show.”

MOAR:

Ron DeSantis’s Drunk Black History

Florida Will Shrink Black History Until It’s Small Enough To Drown In Ron DeSantis’s Bathtub

Ron DeSantis Cancels ‘Un-American’ African American Studies AP Classes, F*ck You Is Why

The College Board, which creates Advanced Placement classes and tests that can be applied to college credits, as well as the SATs and other standardized tests, issued a press release Tuesday saying it will release its “official” framework for the African American studies course on February 1, the first day of Black History Month. That framework, the College Board said, would incorporate feedback gathered throughout the 2022-2023 pilot period of the class, which has been in development for a decade.

The press release didn’t specify that Florida’s objections were the reason for the updates to the framework; if anything, it sounds like the sort of routine boilerplate you’d get in any announcement of a coming plan:

This framework, under development since March 2022, replaces the preliminary pilot course framework under discussion to date […]

Before a new AP course is made broadly available, it is piloted in a small number of high schools to gather feedback from high schools and colleges. The official course framework incorporates this feedback and defines what students will encounter on the AP Exam for college credit and placement.

Not a word about any changes to meet DeSantis’s demands to strip out all the woke indoctrination stuff. Considering how much time and work and committee planning goes into developing a class that’s going to be available nationwide, it’s pretty freaking unlikely the College Board would even attempt a radical pruning of the course in roughly a week. It’s really not like one teacher rewriting a lesson plan at the last minute, or any document the Trump administration ever slapped together.

But hey, it said it would replace the pilot version that DeSantis rejected, so members of his administration got busy proclaiming victory. DeSantis press secretary Bryan Griffin exulted on Twitter that “Thanks to @GovRonDeSantis‘ principled stand for education over identity politics, the College Board will be revising the course for the entire nation,” which again, is almost certainly not what happened, we will bet cash money on that.

The Florida Department of Education also issued a statement thanking the College Board for wholesale revisions that were definitely not mentioned by the College Board statement either:

We are glad the College Board has recognized that the originally submitted course curriculum is problematic, and we are encouraged to see the College Board express a willingness to amend. AP courses are standardized nationwide, and as a result of Florida’s strong stance against identity politics and indoctrination, students across the country will consequentially have access to an historically accurate, unbiased course.

As Governor DeSantis said, African American History is American History, and we will not allow any organization to use an academic course as a gateway for indoctrination and a political agenda. We look forward to reviewing the College Board’s changes and expect the removal of content on Critical Race Theory, Black Queer Studies, Intersectionality and other topics that violate our laws.

We are of course ready to say we were wrong if the final version of the AP framework released next week perfectly fits Florida’s demands, although we think it’s far more likely that DeSantis and crew will 1) reject it yet again as too dangerous for Florida teens or B) find two or three tiny changes, greatly overstate their significance, and claim victory.

In any case, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker have issued their own statements urging the College Board not to make the cuts demanded by DeSantis, which is, as we say, a far more likely outcome anyway. (AND MAKE IT GAYER, says Pritzker.) No doubt DeSantis will blame any non-revisions to the course framework on those two dangerous libs.

[Politico / WFLA / The Hill / Tallahassee Democrat / NBC News / Image: Screenshot, WPBF-TV on Youtube.]

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