Cathy Young, writing in The Bulwark, describes the far-right’s hatred for Zelensky and the Ukrainian cause.
Donald Trump Jr. tweeted: “Zelensky is basically an ungrateful international welfare queen.”
He subsequently tweeted a photoshopped image of a naked Hunter Biden standing next to Zelensky on the podium at the Capitol. Twitter deleted his tweet, despite its famous abandonment of content moderation.
Tucker Carlson railed about Zelensky’s combat fatigues, calling them a disgrace.
On and on it goes. She points out that the far-right actually likes the “traditional” (authoritarian) values of Putin, Viktor Orban, and Jair Bolsonaro.
They despise the liberal secular values of the west and are hostile to Ukraine’s desire to be part of the west. So they heap insults on Zelensky and his embattled country, even as Russian missiles rain down on schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings.
Step back from the day-to-day slog to meet your pressing needs. Put aside the daily onslaught of depressing bad news. Take a deep breath to take five away from the insecurity of its all.
Imagine what life would be like if the needs of you, your family, friends, and community were met. What if you didn’t have to worry about any of it?
Step back from the day-to-day slog to meet your pressing needs. Put aside the daily onslaught of depressing bad news. Take a deep breath to take five away from the insecurity of its all.
Imagine what life would be like if the needs of you, your family, friends, and community were met. What if you didn’t have to worry about any of it?
What would it change if ….
the cost of high-quality health care was not an issue for anyone?
no one had to choose between going to work and taking care of themselves and their families when sick?
a decent place to live was assured to everyone?
all schools got the same resources as upper middle-class schools?
public post-secondary education was free to all?
paying for food, clothing, and care were not an issue for any seniors?
all work was respected and was paid with a living wage?
clean energy was assured in the near future for our children and grandchildren?
What if we were not alone in dealing with all of it?
Pie in the sky? It’s not possible? Not so, fast. A lot of folks in a lot of other countries get some, most, or all these needs met. In the U.S. none of it is assured.
It’s not just that. Unmet needs fester, driving insecurity, toxic resentment, and helplessness.
Shifting that dynamic is all about organizing to shift who has voice and power. It is all about a shift perspective from, “I wish I had that,” to “That is my right!” And then, “We demand it.”
To achieving it, we need to know what we are up against. A recent example: Dismissing the voices of workers, Congress just preemptively stepped in to settle a private labor dispute ahead of a potential strike–undermining the only leverage unions have, withholding their labor–without even stipulating the modest demand for seven paid sick days. Railroad owners won. Railroad workers lost. Elected Democratic and Republican lawmakers regularly prioritize the voice and power of corporations and the wealthy over that of workers and their families.
Politico reports that there was no sweep for partisans of the culture war issues. We can expect to see more attacks on teachers, students, and school boards in the next election, based on hyped-up falsehoods about race and gender. Support from rightwing conservative foundations—the usual suspects—will keep alive the battles and the fake organizations leading them. (Expect a special report soon from the Network for Public Education on these front groups attacking school boards, written by an authority on Dark Money).
Juan Perez Jr. of Politico writes:
THE DIVIDED CLASSROOM — In case you missed it amid the advertising noise and campaign spending avalanche of November’s midterms, 2022 proved to be an incredibly busy — and contentious — year for education elections.
Fifteen states and the District of Columbia held state school board or education superintendent races this year. Roughly 1,800 local board seats across some 560 districts in 26 states were also up for grabs on Nov. 8, according to the nonpartisan nonprofit Ballotpedia.
Who came out on top? Nobody. Neither Democrats nor Republicans managed a clean sweep.
This means the state of education in the United States remains divided sharply along partisan lines — and the education wars are likely to continue unabated in 2023 and beyond.
The bitter differences between the two sides and lack of consensus between the poles of both parties — over everything from teaching about slavery and gender identity to childhood vaccinations – offer little incentive for either side to back down.
“We are stopping Critical Race Theory from being taught, stopping access to obscene pornography in our schools, and ending the tenure of radicalism and indoctrination of our kids because the left is waging a civil war in our classrooms,” newly-elected Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters recently wrote in the Daily Caller.
Candidates who supported having race and sex-related curricula or Covid-19 safety requirements in schools won about 40 percent of the roughly 1,800 local board elections tallied by Ballotpedia this year, and tended to win in counties President Joe Biden carried in the 2020 election. Candidates with opposing views won about 30 percent of their elections, often doing so in counties held by former President Donald Trump.
Nearly one-third of incumbent school board members also lost to their challengers on Nov. 8.
“People didn’t feel listened to. Parents felt they lost agency and power over their kids’ education,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers labor union, recently told Nightly. “My concern is that we can’t have two countries. This is one United States of America, and we have an obligation to help kids — regardless of whether they’re in South Carolina, Tennessee, New York or California — to learn how to critically think.”
As they turn toward 2023, Democrats take solace in battleground state victories for governor, successful education-related ballot measures and local school board races where moderate incumbents defeated far-right challengers in Louisville, Ky., the suburbs of Austin, Texas, and other places.
Sure, conservatives lost plenty of races. But they won more than enough to show their brand of culture-based education politics thrives in areas controlled by the party faithful. Trump seems to have this on his mind, too. The former president promised schools would lose their federal funding if they don’t get rid of critical race theory, and what he described as “radical civics and gender insanity,” when he announced his reelection bid.
No state school boards with elections this year flipped partisan control, according to the National Association of State Boards of Education. But majority parties did expand their influence on boards in Colorado, Kansas and Utah while conservative incumbents often lost primary challenges.
Candidates endorsed by two upstart GOP-aligned political committees also won roughly half of their midterm elections.
Candidates backed by Moms for Liberty, a group formed by a former Florida school board member to fight school Covid-19 mask requirements and controversial library books, won about half of their 2022 elections, according to the organization. The 1776 Project PAC, a group opposed to the critical race theory academic framework that examines how race and racism have become ingrained in American institutions, saw a similar win-loss ratio.
I just made a donation to the AFT’s emergency fund to buy generators for Ukraine. As you probably know, Russia is losing on the battlefield so has targeted Ukraine’s infrastructure. Thecc Cc winter has begun, and Russia has destroyed power stations that generate heat, water supplies and light. Russia is making war on the civilian population, hoping to reduce their circumstances so that they die of the cold and/or starvation. Making war on the civilian population is a war crime, but Russia is determined to destroy Ukraine regardless of international norms.
Today is a time to reflect what we are grateful for.
What are you grateful for?
I am grateful for life. Last year, I had open heart surgery, and for the first five days after surgery, my life hung in the balance. Yet here I am, reading, writing, thinking, alive.
I am grateful for my dear family: My wife, Mary. My children, my grandchildren. I am blessed to be with and near people I love who love me.
I am grateful to live in America. Despite all the challenges our country faces, it’s still a wonderful place to live, where communities come together in bad times, and strangers act to help others.
I am grateful to live in a country where I can speak and write what I wish without fear of punishment.
I am grateful for the rise of a young generation whose idealism and vision will change our country for the better.
I am grateful for the dear friends at the Network for Public Education, whose advocacy and passion on behalf of democracy, public schools, their teachers and their teachers inspires me every day.
I am grateful for the educators who put students first, who work tirelessly for one of the nation’s most important and vital institutions.
I am grateful for the readers of this blog, many of whom have become good friends, without our having met in person. I am grateful too for what I learn every day from you.
If you have read this far, I want you to know that I don’t intend to post much this weekend. Maybe nothing at all.
CBS News published a brief description of the 50 most banned books this years. Most, as you will see, are about sexuality, gender and race. Parents and activists fear that children will become what they read about. They worry that reading about gay students will turn their children gay. Why would they worry that their children become racist.
This surge in censorship is a testament of sorts to the power of the written word. The peculiar thing about this crusade to ban books is that far more explicit material about sexuality and race is readily available on the internet.
Censorship of books, textbooks, even standardized tests is not new. I wrote a book called The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. The pressure groups come from the right and the left and from groups claiming to represent the elderly, women, religious folk, and all sorts of others. Every publisher of textbooks and tests has “bias and sensitivity” guidelines, long lists of words, phrases, topics, and images that will never appear in a textbook or on a test. I have a list at the end of the book that includes more than 800 banned items.
John G. Rodden writes on the website American Purposeabout the educational struggle between Ukrainians and Russiand. Ukrainians want their children to learn the Ukrainian language and literature. Wherever Russia has captured tos, cities, or villages, it switches the curriculum to Russian language and literature. Rodden is a scholar who has written several books about George Orwell.
The 2022–23 school year in war-torn Ukraine began this fall under conditions that Americans—and even Europeans old enough to remember World War II—can barely fathom. Three-quarters of the schools have been unable to open at all because they lack bomb shelters, air raid sirens nearby, or underground classrooms and lavatories. Russian bombing campaigns can last for several hours; all classes are therefore held remotely, insofar as children have access to computers and Wi-Fi.
Understandably, the attention of the world, including that of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his advisors in Kyiv, is focused on battlefield advances and reversals. And yet a parallel war is under way, one that has received only spotty attention in the English-language media, though the German and French presses have covered it more extensively. It is a culture war, a Slavic “Battle of the Books” that goes far beyond the imaginary world in Jonathan Swift’s 1704 book. In Swift’s Battle of the Books, he imagined an epic battle in a library—a so-called “quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns”—where books come alive, with authors both classical (e.g., Homer, Pindar, Plato, Aristotle, Vergil) and contemporary (e.g., Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Dryden, Aphra Benn) duking it out.
The twenty-first century Eurasian counterpart is no mere entry in a game of literary fisticuffs conducted with courtly fellow men of letters. It is a deadly serious affair that Ukrainian officials regard as a retaliatory counteroffensive. For the Ukrainians this isn’t just a Battle of Books–this is a deep, visceral, and emotional reaction to their country being eviscerated and destroyed by Russian forces.
In their view, they have been forced into it by the ruthless “reeducation” policy that Russia has undertaken in occupied Ukraine. The Slavic Battle of the Books is about which authors Ukrainians will read and study. It is a war to “win the minds of men,” as the old Stalinist slogan phrased it. Wherever it leads, it has already validated one venerable contention about which both the Ancients and the Moderns were in full agreement: Ideas have consequences.
Kherson was the first regional capital that the Russian army captured after the invasion of Ukraine. A few weeks ago, Putin declared that Russia had annexed four regions of Ukraine, including Kherson, and henceforth they would be “forever Russian.” That occurred at the same time that Russian troops were retreating before the Ukrainian forces. A few days ago, Russian troops abandoned Kherson, and Ukrainian troops arrived. They were greeted by jubilant crowds waving the Ukrainian flag and singing the Ukrainian national anthem.
But before the troops left, they carried out a special mission for V. Putin. They robbed the grave of Potemkin, who conquered Ukraine on behalf of Russia and Empress Catherine the Great in the 18th century. Simon Sebag Montefiore, a British historian of Russia, reports at the website Airmail that Putin is obsessed with Potemkin. Potemkin is Putin’s role model. His body was buried in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Kherson. Before the Russians evacuated Kherson, they removed Potemkin’s bones and sent them to Moscow.
A Ukrainian tearing down a billboard with the slogan “We are together with the Russian government” in Kherson, Ukraine, on Sunday.Credit…Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
KHERSON, Ukraine — Iryna Dyagileva’s daughter attended a school where the curriculum included memorizing the Russian national anthem.
But teachers ignored it, instead quietly greeting students in the morning with a salute: “Glory to Ukraine!”
The occupation authorities asked Olha Malyarchuk, a clerk at a taxi company, to settle bills in rubles. But she kept paying in the Ukrainian currency, hryvnia.
“It just didn’t work,” she said of Russian propaganda, beamed into homes through televisions and plastered on billboards for the nine months of Russia’s occupation of Kherson. On Sunday, she was walking in a park, waving a small Ukrainian flag.
One roadside billboard proclaimed in bold text, “We are together with Russia!” But a teenager who offered only his first name, Oleksandr, had shimmied up the supporting pole on Sunday and was tearing the sign to pieces. Asked how he felt, he said, “free.”
The Ukrainian army has reclaimed hundreds of villages in towns in three major counteroffensives, north of Kyiv, in the northeastern Kharkiv region and now in the southern Kherson region.
But the city of Kherson stands out: it was the focus of a major Russian campaign to assimilate the citizenry and stamp out of the Ukrainian identity. Judging by his assertions that Ukrainians and Russians are one nation, it was a goal President Vladimir V. Putin had harbored for all of Ukraine, had his military been more successful.
After Russian forces captured Kherson in the early days of the war, Ukrainian national songs were banned in the city. Speaking Ukrainian could lead to arrest. Schools adopted a Russian curriculum, and young students were to be told that they were Russians, not Ukrainians.
In the first hours and days after the city’s recapture by the Ukrainian army, signs have emerged suggesting that the Russian attempt was a largely futile effort, at least among those who remained in the city.
Many pro-Russian residents had evacuated as Ukraine’s army advance on the city, and the Kremlin-installed authorities had encouraged residents to leave. Many local government officials had collaborated with the Russians.
Serhiy Bloshko, a construction worker, had lived at the homes of friends through the nine-month occupation, fearful he’d be arrested for joining anti-occupation protests in March that broke out soon after the Russian army arrived. Soldiers indeed went to his home, he said. Not finding him, they made off with his television and refrigerator, he said.
“They repressed the pro-Ukrainian population,” he said while waiting in a line for water on Sunday afternoon. Friends had been detained and vanished, he said. Of the cultural assimilation effort, he said, “what happened here was ethnic cleansing.”
The entry into his city of the two armies, one in February and the other last week, was telling, he said.
“When our soldiers drove in, their machine guns were pointed up, into the air,” Mr. Bloshko said. “When the Russians drove in, their guns were pointed at the people. That explains everything. And they said they were our liberators.”
This is one of the best summaries I have seen of what Republicans will do if they are elected and gain control. It’s about two minutes. Please watch and share.
She leaves out one salient point, made by Kevin McCarthy. The Republicans will cut aid to Ukraine and use the money to finish building Trump’s Great Wall (that Mexico was supposed to pay for).
PEN America is an organization that represents authors and defends freedom of expression, here and elsewhere in the world. I am proud to be a member. I support their belief in the freedom to write and the freedom to read.
The overwhelming number of banned books deal with race and gender. The censors apparently think that no one will learn about race or gender if no books are available.
They forget about the Internet and television, which they can’t censor.
The only book, to my knowledge, that has been specifically banned by state legislation, is The 1619 Project. That’s a shame because it is enormously informative about the history of racism.
