The Atlantic: What Happens When Streets are Closed to Cars and Open for Play?

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2024 //
5

The Atlantic contains a lovely article by contributing writer Stephanie H. Murray about a growing movement to close streets to cars so that children can play without adult direction.

She begins:

In the summer of 2009, Amy Rose and Alice Ferguson, two mothers living on Greville Road in Bristol, a midsize city in southwest England, found themselves in a strange predicament: They saw entirely too much of their kids. “We were going, like, Why are they here?” Rose told me. “Why aren’t they outside?” The friends decided to run an experiment. They applied to shut their quarter-mile road to traffic for two hours after school on a June afternoon—not for a party or an event but just to let the children who lived there play. Intentionally, they didn’t prepare games or activities, Rose told me, as it would have defeated the purpose of the inquiry: “With time, space, and permission, what happens?”

The results were breathtaking. The dozens of kids who showed up had no problem finding things to do. One little girl cycled up and down the street “3,000 times,” Rose recalled. “She was totally blissed out.” Suddenly, the modern approach to children’s play, in which parents shuttle their kids to playgrounds or other structured activities, seemed both needlessly extravagant and wholly insufficient. Kids didn’t need special equipment or lessons; they just needed to be less reliant on their time-strapped parents to get outside.

The experiment also produced some unexpected results. As children poured into the street, some ran into classmates, only just then realizing that they were neighbors. Soon it became clear to everyone present that far more children were living on Greville Road than anyone had known. That session, and the many more it prompted, also became the means by which adult residents got to know one another, which led to another revelation for Ferguson and Rose: In numerous ways, a world built for cars has made life so much harder for adults.

The dominance of cars has turned children’s play into work for parents, who are left coordinating and supervising their children’s time and ferrying kids to playgrounds and play dates. But it has also deprived adults of something more profound. Over the years, as Rose and Ferguson have expanded their experiment to other parts of the United Kingdom, neighborhoods across the country have discovered that allowing kids to play out in the open has helped residents reclaim something they didn’t know they were missing: the ability to connect with the people living closest to them.

Modern folks tend to think that streets serve largely mobile purposes—getting cars from one place to another in swift, orderly fashion. But “prior to the automobile, streets had a ton of stationary functions,” Marcel Moran, a faculty fellow at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, told me. Streets were where people sold wares and socialized. And particularly after the United States and Europe began to industrialize, streets were the primary location for the rising number of urban-dwelling children to play, according to Jon Winder, a historian and the author of Designed for Play: Children’s Playgrounds and the Politics of Urban Space, 1840–2010. This remained the case in the U.K. and the U.S. even after playgrounds became widespread in the early 20th century. Only when cars hit the streets in larger numbers did things begin to change. Society, Winder told me, began prioritizing “the movement and storage of motor vehicles over children and their playful behavior…”

Rose and Ferguson’s project on Greville Road is of course not the first or only effort to reclaim the streets for children. In the U.K., play streets emerged roughly a century ago as a sort of compromise in the process of booting kids off the street. But after peaking in the 1960s, they largely dwindled out, to be revived only in the late 2000s. New York has had a play-streets program since 1914, and Philadelphia for more than half a century—and recently, the idea has been taken up in other U.S. cities. Chicago launched a play-streets program in 2012, followed by Los Angeles in 2015; an initiative in Portland, Oregon, hosted its first events in 2023.

In the U.K., Rose, Ferguson, and their friend Ingrid Skeels expanded their experiment in 2011 by founding Playing Out, an organization that has helped residents on more than 1,000 streets in dozens of cities across the country set up their own play sessions. These typically last for two hours and occur weekly, biweekly, or monthly.

Open the link to read the rest of the article. It’s an inspiring idea that is great for children and parents alike. Plus, it introduces neighbors to each other.

Categories Childhood, Creativity, Freedom, Parents, Play

Simone Biles: “I Love My ‘Black Job’”

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2024 //
8

Simone Biles posted a tweet mocking Trump’s claim that immigrants are taking away “Black jobs.” This story was published by the New York Daily News.

Gymnast Simone Biles dinged former President Trump on Friday by tweeting “I love my Black job” after her latest Olympic gold medal win.

Taking a victory lap after her winning performance at the Paris Games, Biles trolled Trump for his controversial claims that undocumented immigrants are taking so-called “Black jobs” from Americans.

The world champion was amplifying a post by singer/songwriter Ricky Davila that praised Biles as the greatest of all time.

“Iconic photo of the GOAT mastering her black job and collecting gold medals,” Davila tweeted.

Biles won the all-around gold medal on Thursday, her second of the Paris Games. It raised her career haul to nine gold medals, and she could add even more honors with three more finals looming in coming days.

The wins amount to a remarkable comeback after Biles withdrew from the last Olympics to focus on her mental health.

Her tweet amounts to a rebuke of Trump who has refused to back down from controversial remarks about “Black jobs” at his recent debate with President Biden.

Trump doubled down on the comment Wednesday during a forum with reporters at the National Association of Black Journalists in which he also falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris only recently “became Black.”

“A Black job is anybody that has a job,” Trump said at the NABJ event, drawing derisive groans from the crowd.

The spat with Trump isn’t the first tangle between Biles and his right-wing supporters.

Biles’ 2021 decision to withdraw from competition sparked an unusual backlash from Trump’s MAGA allies who suggested she should suck it up and compete regardless of her health concerns.

One of them was Trump’s vice presidential running mate JD Vance, who denounced Americans for supporting Biles’ difficult decision at the time.

“I think it reflects pretty poorly on our … society that we try to praise people, not for moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments,” said Vance, who was launching an ultimately successful run for U.S. Senate.

Democrats seized on the remarks this week to take shots at Vance, who has stumbled badly in his debut on the national stage with comments deriding Americans who don’t have children.

“The audacity of JD Vance to go after the GOAT @Simone_Biles as if he isn’t the most unpopular V.P. pick in decades,” tweeted Aida Ross, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee.

Categories Elections, Humor, Trump

Anand Girihadaras: Yes, Kamala Is Both

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2024 //
7

Donald Trump is incredulous that Kamala Harris is both Indian and black. He ridiculed before an audience of black journalists for “turning black,” presumably to advance her career. The claim is false and bigoted. It says more about Trump than it does about Kamala. JD Vance endorsed Trump’s insulting statement, saying that Kamala is a “chameleon.” This is rich coming from a man who is married to an Indian woman and whose children are biracial.

Anand Girihadaras, a brilliant journalist, wrote about the dilemmas of biracial people on his blog, The Ink:

Today Donald Trump sought to question Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity, much as he rose to political prominence doubting Barack Obama’s origins.

He mused that she had always cast herself as Indian, until one day, suddenly, magically, she turned Black. Well, this is false, first of all. And dumb. Harris went to Howard University, an historically Black college, and has identified as both Indian and Black all her life. She had the unusual childhood situation of being raised by an Indian mother who, having divorced Harris’s Black father, nevertheless invested great effort and intention in exposing Harris and her sister, Maya, to the Black community and Black tradition and thought, as Harris writes in her memoir, The Truths We Hold.

Since Trump, who is of German and Scottish heritage, cannot seem to hold in his head the notion of people with more than one heritage, we’re offering this primer. It’s an essay from our archives, from 2020, on Vice President Harris’s layers of identity, viewed through the lens of caste — of the divisions and hierarchies that have haunted both the Black and Indian sides of her lineage.

The many layers of Kamala Harris’ identity

Kamala Harris is the first woman of color on a major-party presidential ticket. She is, in fact, you might say, a woman of two colors: Black, owing to her Jamaican father; and brown, owing to her Indian mother. And each of those lineages comes with its own histories and complications and inheritances related to caste.

Harris almost certainly wouldn’t exist if her maternal grandfather had not been an improbably progressive upper-caste Indian, a defier of caste. A Brahmin civil servant in newly independent India, P.V. Gopalan might have been expected, as The Los Angeles Times notes, to hew to the convention that “destined Brahmin offspring for arranged marriages and comfortable careers in academia, government service or the priesthood — if they were men. Women were not expected to work at all.” Instead, all four of his children traveled untraditional roads. His son married a Mexican woman. A daughter became a doctor and never married. Another daughter became an information scientist and didn’t have children. And Shyamala, the senator’s late mother, pulled off a caste-defiance hat trick of Things a Well-Born Indian Woman is Not Supposed To Do: leaving the country alone as a 19-year-old woman; pursuing a master’s degree as said woman; and not only failing to marry an Indian man but marrying a Black man — a brave act given anti-Black racism among Indians.

So Harris descends from privilege in the Indian system of caste, but only came to be born because of the rejection of the rules of that privilege. And her father’s background implicates other systems of — and questions about — caste. Donald Harris was Black and Jamaican. He and Shyamala met during their work for the civil rights movement. So it was the battle against the American caste regime that brought them together. Yet because of her father’s foreign provenance, Harris has long been met with (rather unfair) questions about the authenticity of her Blackness. “What does it mean to call Kamala Harris ‘black’ in an American context?” the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams has tweeted. “People keep saying, ‘Well, she looks black.’ Always good to keep in mind that ‘race’ has never strictly been about how someone looks. My blue eyed children would qualify for reparations and Harris would not.” His ground for this latter claim is that Harris cannot trace an ancestor back to American slavery. (There have also been unsubstantiated suggestions that Harris’ ancestors include an enslaver — suggestions that are intended to cast her bona fides as a survivor of the American caste system into doubt, suggestions that seem utterly unfamiliar with hemispheric history.) But whether or not Kamala Harris’ future critics would recognize her and her sister as Black, their mother had no doubt. As Harris writes in her memoir, Shyamala “understood very well she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident black women.”

At that, Shyamala couldn’t be accused of failing. And as Harris grew into a trailblazing public official and a political superstar, the ghost of caste hovered. At every step of her career, she defied America’s racial caste system and other hierarchies, accumulating a pile of firsts: first woman elected district attorney of San Francisco; first woman, first African-American, and first person of South Asian origin elected as attorney general of California; first United States senator of South Asian descent (and only the second African-American woman). But, like Barack Obama’s ascent to power, Harris’ successes also illustrated the limitations of singular defiers of caste regimes. As the writer Casey Gerald has said of his own transcendence of caste, rising to great heights from a hard-up African-American community in Dallas, “The American dream relies on stories like mine…to distract from the American reality: There is a conveyor belt that sends most young people, especially from neighborhoods like mine, from nothing to nowhere, while the chosen few are randomly picked off and celebrated.”

There is also the issue of what is expected of those from disfavored castes in exchange for the chance to defy caste systems. A lot of us would have wanted an angrier Barack Obama when it came to the abuses that led to the 2008 financial crisis, but, given how many white Americans react to Black anger, that man would probably have remained a professor in Chicago. Those of disfavored castes permitted to rise within caste systems must often navigate an extra expectation to prove that they will not rock the caste boat. Which is hardly to excuse Senator Harris’ controversial record as a prosecutor — a record that, for certain progressives, puts her beyond the pale. She did what prosecutors do — put people in jail — and she did it within the caste regime that is, in Michelle Alexander’s phrase, “the new Jim Crow.”For many of Harris’ critics, it is especially disheartening that a pioneering woman of color — of those two colors — rose to power through, among other things, jailing Black and brown people. It is a reminder that representation matters, and that structure matters as well, and advances in representation can bring about advances in structure or can crowd them out and stave them off. It is progressive to diversify the rooms where it happens, but diversifying those rooms doesn’t necessarily, on its own, make them progressive.

Please open the link to read the article in full.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Hypocrisy, Racism, Trump

Trump Doubles Down on his Racist Remarks about Kamala

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2024 //
14

After telling the National Association of Black Journalists that Kamala Harris “turned black” and that she used to portray herself as Indian, Trump was roundly criticized for raising the issue of her race. Kamala is the daughter of an India-born scientist and a Jamaica-born father who is an economist. She has never denied her biracial heritage.

Yet Trump released a photo of Kamala with her mother’s family, who are Indian, hoping to prove that she only recently “turned black.” This is ridiculous. Kamala went to a black university and joined a black sorority.

Some Republicans thought his attack on Kamala was embarrassing but he’s still the party’s candidate, and they still support the convicted felon.

The New York Daily News reported:

Former President Trump on Thursday posted a photograph of Vice President Kamala Harris wearing an Indian sari as he continued to push false racially charged claims that the Democratic presidential candidate isn’t really Black.A day after accusing Harris of only recently claiming Black heritage, Trump leaned into the controversy by sharing the photo of Harris wearing traditional Indian attire alongside her mother and maternal relatives.

“Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago!  Trump wrote on his social media site. “Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian Heritage are very much appreciated,”

The message came as Trump and his campaign showed no signs of backing away from the firestorm controversy he launched during a contentious 35-minute sparring match with reporters at the National Association of Black

Trump’s campaign posted a headline depicting Harris as the “first Indian-American senator” elected from California as he addressed a rally in Pennsylvania.J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, praised Trump for having the courage to respond honestly to tough questions and slammed Harris as a “chameleon.”

Harris’ father is a Black immigrant from Jamaica and she has always proudly claimed both Black and South Asian heritage. She attended Howard University, a historically Black college, and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically Black sorority.

Like most mixed-race people, Harris says there is nothing to be ashamed of about having roots in more than one culture or continent.

Moderate Republicans Thursday distanced themselves from Trump’s gibe as pundits branded the statement as an unforced error that could fuel Democratic political momentum.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu joined Maryland Senate candidate Larry Hogan and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in trashing Trump for the divisive and untrue claim.

“The path to victory in November is not won through character attacks or personal insults,” Sununu tweeted Thursday.

Haha, expecting Trump to abandon character attacks and personal insults is far-fetched. What else would he talk about? Policy? But he never read the briefing books and knows nothing about policy.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Elections, Ethics, Harris, Kamala, Lies, Racism

Robert Hubbell: The Gifts That Joe Biden Has Given Us

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2024 //
19

As I watched the arrival of the three hostages last night, I saw Joe Biden do two quiet deeds, both revealing his character. After he had finished welcoming the hostages and their families, he ascended the steps of the airplane with no fanfare. The rightwing attack machine would no doubt create a video about Biden “wandering away” mindlessly, as they did at the G7 summit, when he walked away from the global leaders to talk to a parachutist (the attack video showed him wandering away and clipped off his conversation with the parachutist—presenting him as a deluded old man). Last night, he entered the hostages’ airplane to thank the flight crew and the security officials who had accompanied the hostages from the moment of their release in Turkey to Andrews Air Base in Maryland.

After he returned to the hostages and their families, he sought out Paul Whelan, who had spent almost six years in Russian captivity. Biden chatted for a minute, then took off his American flag pin and pinned it on Whelan’s jacket. The quiet gestures of a decent man. Could you imagine Trump being quiet and decent? I can’t.

Robert Hubbell writes about Joe Biden’s gifts to his country:

Over his half-century of public service, Joe Biden bestowed many gifts on America. True, like every politician with a fifty-year record, he has made his share of mistakes. But when it mattered most, Joe Biden stepped into the breach to defend democracy and provide hope to America when it flagged.

He stepped up to challenge Trump in 2020 because he believed he could save America from the horrors of a second Trump term. He was right. That was a gift.

Over the next four years, he restored decency, compassion, and fairness to the governance of a great nation. That was a gift.

He proposed and passed sweeping legislation that made historic investments in fighting climate change, protecting the environment, ending child poverty, rebuilding our infrastructure, and bringing chip manufacturing back to America’s shores. That was a gift.

He restored the broken relationships between America and its allies. He was able to do so because our allies recognized that he was a good and decent man whose word could be trusted. That was a gift.

Today, Joe Biden’s gift of renewed international alliances resulted in the freedom of three American citizens wrongfully detained by Russia. The exchange would not have happened except for the relationship of trust and goodwill between President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The German Chancellor agreed to release a Russian assassin held in a German prison. In agreeing to the deal, Chancellor Scholz told Biden, “For you, I will do this.” See WaPo, Inside the deal that led to a blockbuster prisoner swap between U.S., Russia. (This article is accessible to all.)

The complex deal involved 24 detainees and 7 countries—the most complicated prisoner swap between the US and Russia in history. President Biden continued to work his relationships with foreign leaders to close the deal until the very moment he announced his withdrawal from the presidential race. Joe Biden’s selfless efforts were a gift.

The complex deal could not have happened without Joe Biden and Kamala Harris or the cooperation of six US allies. Vice President Kamala Harris played an active role in the negotiations, including private meetings with the Slovenian Prime Minister and German Chancellor at the annual Munich security conference.

The complexity of the deal is beyond the comprehension or attention span of Donald Trump—who boasted that he could secure the release of US detainees from Russia without giving any concessions to Putin. After Joe Biden finished his press conference announcing the deal, a reporter shouted a question about Trump’s boast that “that he could have gotten the hostages out without giving anything in exchange.”

Biden stopped, returned to the lectern, and asked, “Why didn’t he do it when he was president?” See embedded video, here.

Within an hour of completing negotiations for the swap, Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race. Thirty-minutes later, he endorsed Kamala Harris for president. At a time when party leaders and podcast pundits were calling for “mini-primaries” and an “open convention,” Joe Biden had the wisdom and foresight to realize that Democrats needed unity and certainty.

Kamala Harris had earned Joe Biden’s endorsement, and he gave it promptly and enthusiastically. Forty-eight hours later, Kamala Harris was the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. That was Joe Biden’s final gift—a seamless transition that has allowed Democrats to overtake Trump in less than two weeks. Kamala Harris deserves great credit for that result, but so, too, does Joe Biden for his selfless actions, wisdom, and political foresight.

Categories Biden, Character, Elections

Biden Administration Negotiates Historic Prisoner Swap with Russia

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2024 //
15

Good news for the families of Americans wrongfully detained in Russia: their loved ones have been released in a multi-nation deal. The deal confirmed that the U.S. was trying to include Andrei Navalny in the swap but he was killed in a Russian prison camp before the deal could be finalized. Trump, as customary, claimed that he could have gotten the prisoners released in a day, undoubtedly by a phone call to his pal Putin. But Whelan’s family complained that Trump did nothing to get him out of Russian prisons.

MSNBC News reports:

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and Marine veteran Paul Whelan are among the Americans released on Thursday in a prisoner swap between the U.S., Russia and other countries.

Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmashev, U.S. permanent resident Vladimir Kara-Murza and 12 German nationals held in Russia have also been released in exchange for eight Russian nationals who were being held in the U.S., Slovenia, Germany, Norway and Poland.

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called the swap, one of the largest since the Cold War, “historic.” 

“It’s the culmination of many rounds of complex, painstaking negotiations over many, many months,” Sullivan said on a call with reporters Thursday morning.

Gershkovich, 32, was detained in March 2023 while he was on assignment in Moscow. He was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to 16 years in a maximum security prison last month. Both the U.S. government and Gershkovich’s employer, The Wall Street Journal, called his trial a “sham.”

Whelan, 54, had been serving a 16-year sentence in a Russian penal colony after being convicted of espionage in 2020. He was arrested in December 2018 while in Russia for a friend’s wedding. 

Both men and the U.S. government have vehemently denied allegations of espionage.

Negotiations in prisoner swaps between the U.S. and Russia have often been colored by political tensions. Sources told NBC News earlier this year that a deal to release Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, as well as Whelan and Gershkovich, had been in the works before Navalny died in a penal colony in February. At the time, President Joe Biden blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for Navalny’s death.

In 2022, while criticizing the release of WNBA star Brittney Griner in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, former President Donald Trump said he had turned down a deal to secure Whelan’s release in exchange for Bout. Whelan’s family has said that Trump did little to move negotiations forward when he was president. 

Trump has also repeatedly claimed that he would free Gershkovich from Russian detention if he wins the November election, boasting that Putin would “do that for me, but not for anyone else.” His remarks were widely criticized, including for potentially scuttling the possibility of Gershkovich’s release prior to the U.S. election.

Categories Biden, Cruelty, International, Trump

Slate: Silicon Valley Loves J.D.Vance

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2024 //
12

Nitish Pahwa writes in Slate about Silicon Valley’s devotion to J.D. Vance, although women are not so happy in light of Vance’s misogyny.

Pahwa writes:

Who was happiest about Donald Trump’s Monday decision to pick Ohio Sen. and former ivory-tower Appalachia whisperer J.D. Vance as his vice presidential hopeful? It wasn’t rural America, swing-state independents, or women voters. It wasn’t the conservative intelligentsia or the Catholic hard-liners, despite Vance’s self-pronounced conversion. It certainly wasn’t the traditional Republican donors currently opening up their checkbooks for Trump, or even Vance’s own Senate colleagues.

In actuality, it was the Big Tech and venture capital ambassadors who were the happiest of all. Trump had been the target of a heated effort from Silicon Valley types of all strata (well, mostly billionaires) to get Vance to the VP slot. Or, as Axios reported Monday, “a secret lobbying campaign continued into yesterday morning, with Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson and tech investor David Sacks all calling Trump to try to lock in Vance.”

Musk, of course, has struck up a close relationship with Trump in recent months, regularly chatting on the phone with the former president and helping to organize executives who desire to oust President Joe Biden over his pro-worker, pro-tax, and pro-regulation agenda. “Excellent decision by @realDonaldTrump,” Musk tweeted to the ex-president, who still hasn’t returned to posting on the social network formerly known as Twitter.

Longtime VC, podcast host, and political influencer Sacks gave a Monday night speech at the Republican National Convention that, like many of his other screeds, mostly made the case against Biden instead of one for Trump. He did, however, tweet his satisfaction with Vance, praising his military service and subsequent critiques of forever wars, calling him “an American patriot, with the courage to fight America’s wars but the wisdom to know when to avoid them.” (Sacks’ tweet also erroneously implied that Vance had enlisted “when the Twin Towers came down,” even though he couldn’t join and serve until a few years after 9/11.)

It’s not just them. The burgeoning (and amply funded) corpus of anti-regulation, anti-“woke,” pro-crypto, and A.I.–enchanted “effective accelerationists” are fully taken in with Vance. On X, Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey celebrated the coming matchup of “Tech Bro vs Kamala Harris,” while Chamath Palihapitiya—a now-right-leaning VC who co-hosts the megapopular All-In podcast with Sacks—reveled in the potential for “a Bestie adjacent as the VP.” (Besties refers to the four All-In hosts, who recently interviewed Trump on their show.)

Why the obsession with Vance? By the time his star began to rise with the 2016 publication of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, he had pivoted from a career in law to a Silicon Valley gig at Mithril Capital, one of Peter Thiel’s venture capital firms. At that time, Thiel—who’d co-authored an anti-“multiculturalism” bookwith Sacks in the 1990s—was one of Trump’s few outspoken tech-world surrogates, a position that had earned him a speaking slot at the RNC that first nominated Trump for president.

The conservative Vance wasn’t fully aligned with his boss, though: He frequently criticized Trump even while attempting to explain the candidate’s appeal to rural Americans. He also disparaged Silicon Valley in an interview with Slate as “more of a bubble than D.C.” and New York, full of Richie Riches with “no real sense of how frustrated and how destitute a lot of people outside of Silicon Valley are.” In an early-2017 New York Times op-ed, he expressed some admiration for both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama while also “hop[ing] for better policy from the new administration, a health reform package closer to my ideological preferences, and a new approach to foreign policy.” Just two months later, he wrote another Times piece about why the “optimism [that] blinds many in Silicon Valley to the real struggles in other parts of the country” had spurred him to move back to Ohio from California.

Although Vance may have left the Bay Area, he hadn’t left his position with Thiel’s company and remained a “friend and big fan” of him. He got more involved in the VC arena, joining Steve Case’s Revolution firm as a partner in managing a fund that aimed to support more startups based outside the coasts. As reporting from Business Insider has indicated, it is unclear how successful he really was at that mission.

It was clear that Vance’s return home was less about uplifting the “hillbillies” he had whitesplained to the liberal bubble with his memoir and more about seeking higher power. He teased a run for office as far back as late 2016, in a Washington Post interview about his moving plans, and floated the possibilityagain two years later, while joining a conservative influence group chaired by Federalist Society maven Leonard Leo. When that run for office flamed out, he dug deeper into the VC realm, starting a Cincinnati-based fund backed by Thiel and Marc Andreessen in 2020.

Categories Elections, Gender, Republicans, Trump

The Hartman Report: Please Don’t Lie to Students!

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2024 //
14

Greg Palast wrote a guest column for Thom Hartmann about the mendacity of “divisive concepts” laws, which require teachers to lie or suppress the truth, because the truth night make someone uncomfortable. Let’s all be happy by imbibing a steady diet of lies!

Palast writes here:

A Sunday special editorial by my good friend Greg Palast for The Hartmann Report.  Catch Palast this week on Thom.TV

Do you know about Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order 13950?  If you don’t, be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Just weeks before he was fired by America’s voters in 2020, President Trump issued this piece of nastiness which was quickly rescinded by just-inaugurated President Biden.

The Executive Order is a “DCL,” what the right-wing brilliantly calls a, “Divisive Concepts Law.”   These DCL’s terrorize teachers with the threat of losing their jobs if they dare teach the truth of America’s racial history:  That white people enslaved Africans, that the Klan enforced racial vote suppression with the hanging rope.  And God forbid, they teach that women were banned from the vote until the 20th Century.  The Executive Order bans teaching  any historical facts if, 

“….any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex….”

As a practical matter, it means teaching the truth of America’s racial stain will get you fired.   In 2021, Tennessee high school teacher Matt Hawn lost his job because a student accused him of teaching—cover your children’s ears—“Critical Race Theory.”  Hawn said he’d never heard of Critical Race Theory when he was canned.

(Critical Race Theory, taught in law schools, says many of America’s laws and their enforcement, contain a racial bias.  Well, D’oh!].

On Thursday, Vice-President Harris told the American Federation of Teachers convention in Houston, epicenter of the anti-CRT hysteria,

“While you teach students about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history; including book bans! Book bans — in this year 2024!  Just think about it: we want to ban assault weapons and they want to ban books.”  

It was a century ago, that Tennessee was the laughingstock of the nation for prosecuting a schoolteacher for telling his class about human evolution, a story recounted in the film, Inherit the Wind.   Now, a hundred years later, Trumpsters are again passing wind over Tennessee.

And he’s baaaaack!  Trump has put his fixation with censoring “divisive concepts” into the GOP platform.  Details are provided in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 master plan for the master race. 

Ill wind out of Georgia

This ill wind originated in Georgia when Gov. Brian Kemp signed HB1084, threatening the jobs of  teachers fot teaching ‘divisive concepts’ that could make a white child feel “discomfort.”

Who would feel “discomfort” about the uncensored history of Georgia? Well, maybe it’s Gov. Kemp himself.  Because it was the Kemp family, then known as the Habershams, that first brought Africans in chains to Georgia.

Maybe Kemp and family should feel a bit of discomfort.  I spoke with Janie Banse, who told me she is she is heartsick that her cousin, Gov. Kemp, won’t admit that their family’s wealth originated in the African slave trade.  Kemp’s ancestors held the largest auction of human beings in American history, still remembered by Black Georgians today as “Weeping Time,” when 436 men, women and their children were separated and sold.

Georgia’s HB 1084, passed in 2022, 

Prohibit[s] the use of curricula that addresses the topics of slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, or racial discrimination, including topics relating to the enactment and enforcement of laws resulting in racial oppression, segregation, and discrimination in a professionally and academically appropriate manner and without espousing personal political beliefs;

And what if a teacher expresses a personal distaste for slavery?
Since Georgia was among the first to pass a “DCL,” and at least 16 states have followed.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, dubbed his DCL the “Stop WOKE Act.”

He banned the College Board’s AP African American Studies course and supported new Black history standards that include the requirement to teach, “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

I can’t make this up.

Since 2021, at least 27 states have imposed or proposed bans or restrictions on teaching topics related to race and gender. Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona and Oklahoma all passed these Divisive Concepts laws.  What do these states have in common?  According to rankings by US News and World Report, they are all in the nation’s bottom third in educational achievement.  Apparently, they won’t teach uncensored history—but then, it’s not clear that they teach much history at all.

Killing Killers

Trump’s DLC brigade is not just putting a blindfold over students regarding slavery and Jim Crow.  Oklahoma’s Divisive Concepts Law has effectively silenced the true story of the state that was once known officially as, “Indian Territory.”

Jim Gray, former Principal Chief of the Osage Nation, told me that teachers throughout the state have been yanking copies of David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon off their classroom shelves.  Killers, on which the Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio movie is based, tells the true story about how, in the 1920s, over 100 Oklahoma Osage were murdered for their oil rights.

The insidious brilliance of the Oklahoma law is that it has a fuzzy general prohibition on “divisive” concepts—with teachers facing loss of their teaching credentials and the entire school district losing funding.  Because teachers have to guess which books or films will get them fired, the result is mass self-censorship, with Killersculled from classrooms across the state.

A RAND corporation study found that a breathtaking two out of three K-12 teachers, “have decided on their own to limit instruction about political and social issues in the classroom.”  Can you blame them?

Any student or parent can put a legal gun to a school principal’s head.  But when the law says, “students,” as a practical matter, they don’t mean young kids on the Reservation.  Every year, on April 22, Oklahoma celebrates “Sooner Rush Day”, the day in 1889, when any white man could simply stand on a plot of land and seize the surrounding 160 acres of what was, by treaty, Indian Territory.  Indigenous kids have to re-enact the theft of their property whether they feel discomfort or not.

I have included this story of the Sooner Rush land grab in my documentary, Long Knife: the Osage Nation, Koch Oil and the new Killers of the Flower Moon.  And for that alone, says Chief Gray, the chance it will screen in an Oklahoma school, even a state university, is zilch.

But some states are not shy about creating Black Lists of books to ban.  Assigning anti-racist classics Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, could kill a teacher’s career.  PEN America counted 3,132 books banned in nine states in the 2022-23 school year.
 

Evicted from the Historical Society

Cui Bono? Who benefits from historical amnesia?  Kemp alone was not the only white boy to make his fortune from a slaver’s whip.  Historic amnesia is a profit center covering many historic misdeeds from Jim Crow to union busting to corporate corruption.

I found this out when I was physically ejected from the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah.  I was having a polite interview with the Society’s in-house historian, Dr. Stan Deaton, who was explaining that the Klan took over control of the South when, in 1876, Republicans lost both the popular vote and the Electoral vote—yet a pact between the Klan-backed Southern Democrats and northern Republicans used a sly maneuver to overturn the vote and install the GOP candidate as President.  It came down to one official, Dr. Deaton noted, then added, “We saw Mike Pence in that situation recently.”

The second the historian uttered the words, “Mike Pence,” the door flew open and the Society’s PR man halted the interview and expelled me from the building, saying, “We have to protect the new corporate donors on our board.”

I was curious.  Who were these “donors” needing protection from history?  I found their gala dinner on YouTube with their tuxedoed corporate money men:  Georgia Pacific (owned by Koch Industries), Home Depot (owned by right-wing union buster Ken Langone), and Southern Company, whom I investigated some years ago for racketeering and the inexplicable death of whistleblowers.  And the Chairman of the Historical Society?  Gov. Brian Kemp.

The Occupation

Just below Savannah, at the Kemp family’s old plantation, I spoke with caretaker and Councilman Griffin Lotson whose own great-grandmother was sold at Weeping Time by Kemp’s progenitors.

Lotson emphasizes the connection between this legally enforced historical amnesia and the fight for voting rights. He says,  “Suppressing history is suppressing the vote.” 

Back in Oklahoma, the current Principal Chief of the Osage, Geoffrey Standing Bear, explained that if Oklahoma were to admit that its “Sooner Rush” was simply theft from the indigenous owners of the land, then it would force open eyes to what he calls, the “military occupation [of Native land] that continues today.”

Napoleon famously said, “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” Trump’s DCL crusade sees history as a set of truths silenced

.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, History, Lies

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump’s Belligerent Response to Black Journalists

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2024 //
14

Yesterday, former President Trump spoke to the National Association of Black Journalists and made a fool of himself. He was, as usual, angry and belligerent. He sneered at the journalists who questioned him. He called himself the best President for black Americans since Abraham Lincoln. And he questioned whether Kamala Harris was really black. He said she was Indian and only in recent years had “turned black.” This was of course ridiculous. Harris has never hidden the fact that her mother was from India (a research scientist) and her father was Jamaican (an economist). At age 18, she chose to enroll at Howard University, an HBCU, and joined a black women’s sorority. She is black and Indian, a fact unknown to Trump, and she did not recently, as he put it, “turn black.”

Heather Cox Richardson wrote:

Yesterday, from a Harris campaign event in Atlanta, Georgia, Atlanta reporter Tariro Mzezewa noted that the crowd of 10,000 people “was ecstatic. There was chanting, cheering, singing, and dancing for hours in the lead-up to and throughout the event,” Mzezewa wrote today in Slate. 

Mzezewa reported that rapper Megan Thee Stallion told the audience “I know my ladies in the crowd love their body. And if you want to keep loving your body, you know who to vote for,” before performing her hit “Body.” Georgia Democratic politicians showed up in force: voting rights advocate and former state representative Stacey Abrams, senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, state Democratic Party chair Representative  Nikema Williams, and Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens. 

“What you’re seeing is very real,” Mzezewa wrote, and she quoted an attendee who said: “it’s nice to witness history, but getting to be a part of it from the ground up is a whole other level.” Certainly, the grassroots enthusiasm for Harris’s presidential candidacy is palpable. More and more self-identified groups are launching fundraising calls for Harris; yesterday the Latter-day Saints for Harris—Mormons—announced that they, too, are “putting [their] shoulders to the wheel!” Today the executive board of the United Auto Workers also endorsed Harris.

At last night’s event, Vice President Harris noted that Trump has pulled out of the September debate to which he had previously agreed. “Here’s the funny thing about that,” she said. “He won’t debate, but he and his running mate sure seem to have a lot to say about me,” After hitting the campaign’s refrain that marks MAGA Republican behavior as “weird,” she added to applause: “Well, Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage because, as the saying goes, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.”

Trump did not say it to her face, but today he unloaded spectacularly on three Black female interviewers at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in Chicago.

When ABC News senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott began the interview by quoting a number of his racist statements about Black Americans and asking why, given that history, Black voters should trust him, he lost it. “I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner,” he began. “You don’t even say ‘Hello, how are you?’ Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network.” 

He went on to try to dominate Scott, listing the policies he claimed to have put into place, and to attack the people who organized the event before saying, “I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln. That’s my answer….  And for you to start off a question and answer period…in such a hostile manner, I think it’s a disgrace.”   

As the session began, so it continued, with Trump questioning Harris’s Black identity—while also mispronouncing her name—and warning the attendees that they need “to stop people from invading our country that are…taking Black jobs.” NBC News correspondent Yamiche Alcindor told MSNBC that during the interview, “people were stunned, people were gasping, there were some people who were shouting back at him saying ‘That’s a lie!’” Attendees laughed and jeered at Trump throughout the 37-minute session; his handlers made him leave early. 

Scott accurately summed up Trump’s long history of racism, but lately he has been advertising it. In an interview with Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham aired last night, Trump said that Harris would be “like a play toy” for world leaders. “They look at her and they say we can’t believe we got so lucky. They’re gonna walk all over her.” “I don’t want to say as to why,” he said to the camera, “but a lot of people understand it.”

It is unlikely that his insults and naked racism will appeal to anyone but his base, making his performance, as Jessica Tarlov put it on the Fox News Channel, “a complete, absolute dumpster fire.” It is possible that Trump has lost the ability to read a room and reassure his audience that he’s a good bet. But it is also possible that Trump cannot bear to see the enthusiasm building behind Harris, not only because of its electoral meaning, but also because it reveals how small his own following is and how much people loathe him.  

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who produces wonderful video threads of important events, “put together an 11-minute supercut of Trump angrily self-immolating at the NABJ before his handlers pulled him from the stage.” 

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo analyzed Trump’s meltdown in Chicago this way: “I think we’re getting the first view of imploding Donald Trump as he realizes that what was his for the taking ten days ago is slipping away and he’s likely to go to prison rather than the White House. He [is] being dominated and humiliated by Harris and he’s losing it.” His post after the interview, in which he boasted “[t]he questions were Rude and Nasty, often in the form of a statement, but we CRUSHED IT!” seemed an attempt to reassert his old pattern of simply declaring things to be true that…aren’t. 

Indeed, one of Trump’s answers to the journalists in Chicago revealed that he cares only about getting elected, rather than governing. It also suggested that his camp is trying to reassure him that his pick of Ohio senator J.D. Vance to be his running mate will not hurt their chances, even as more and more videos of Vance attacking women become public and as he is historically bad in front of television cameras.

Vance has only 18 months of experience in elected office, making him one of the least qualified candidates for vice president in U.S. history. When asked if Vance would be ready “on day one,” to assume the duties of the presidency if necessary, Trump answered a different question altogether, revealing what is uppermost in his mind. “I’ve always had great respect for him…but…historically, the vice president in terms of the election does not have any impact, I mean, virtually no impact. You have two or three days where there’s a lot of commotion…and then that dies down and it’s all about the presidential thing. Virtually never has it mattered…. Historically, the choice of a vice president makes no difference.”   

The Harris campaign responded to Trump’s performance by saying: “The hostility Donald Trump showed on stage today is the same hostility he has shown throughout his life, throughout his term in office, and throughout his campaign for president as he seeks to regain power and inflict his harmful Project 2025 agenda on the American people…. Today’s tirade is simply a taste of the chaos and division that has been a hallmark of Trump’s MAGA rallies this entire campaign,” while “Vice President Harris offers a vision of opportunity and freedom for all Americans.” 

It urged Trump again to “stop playing games and actually show up to the debate on September 10.”

Trump’s petulant fury at the Black journalists today suggests just how dangerous it would be to put him in control of the nation’s law enforcement and military capabilities a second time. We were given a glimpse of how eager he was to turn those capabilities against American citizens in his first term when the Department of Justice today released the report of the department’s inspector general concerning the Trump administration’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C., in summer 2020.

The authors of the report emphasized that they were unable to compel the testimony of officials including then–attorney general William Barr, his chief of staff William Levi, FBI deputy director David Bowdich, and FBI Washington Field Office assistant director in charge Timothy Slater. 

But what they were able to put together even without their information was that, although the protests were largely peaceful, Trump was desperate to get 2,000 federal officers into the area around the White House on June 1, 2020, to increase federal control of the city. To the frustration of the people in charge of the agencies, he could not articulate a mission, only that he wanted 2,000 people around him. With only about 90 officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Bureau of Prisons, and the U.S. Marshals Service on hand early on the morning of June 1, Barr told a conference call with Justice Department leadership that  Trump wanted “max strength” on the streets, and to “dominate the streets.” 

Trump then echoed that language in a call with the nation’s governors, saying, “If you don’t dominate your city and your state, they’re [going to] walk away with you. And we’re doing it in Washington, in D.C., we’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before. But you’re going to have total domination.”

Then, the report says, the administration began to prepare to invoke the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that authorizes the president to deploy the U.S. military and federalized National Guard troops within the United States to suppress civil disorder, insurrection, or rebellion. At 4:48 that evening, lawyers from the Office of Legal Counsel, who advise the president, received an email that the president was going to address the nation at 6:00 and that a proclamation invoking the Insurrection Act should be “ready for signing” before then.

Shortly after, additional officers from the Bureau of Prisons—without names on their uniforms because they do not usually wear them, if you remember the concern over those nameless uniforms—arrived at the White House. Barr was in charge of clearing the streets, and ultimately, by about 9:00 he felt things were calm enough that he advised Trump against invoking the Insurrection Act. 

But it was evidently a close thing.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Racism, Trump

Jennifer Rubin: The He-Man Woman-Haters’ Ticket

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2024 //
14

Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post described Donald Trump and JD Vance as a ticket whose common bond is misogyny. They have done a first-rate job of portraying their disdain for the rights of women. Apparently, they think the role of women is to be barefoot and pregnant or in Trump’s case, willing and grateful recipients of his sexual escapades. In a recent interview on MSNBC, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota referred to Vance as “President of the He-Man Woman-Haters Club,” a reference to a 1994 comical film called The Little Rascals, where a group of pre-adolescent boys swear their eternal enmity towards women.

Rubin wrote

If you wanted to design a presidential ticket most likely to offend women voters, you would pick as the presidential nominee an adjudicated rapist, someone caught bragging about sexually assaulting women and who comes with a history of demeaning and insulting women. You would make it someone who mused about punishing women for having an abortion and who boasts about taking away women’s bodily integrity.

Then, for vice president, you would find someone who has implied women should stay in abusive relationships (he denies that’s what he meant but listen for yourself), wants to ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest, favors a “federal response” to prevent women from traveling to states where abortion is legal, accuses single women (“childless cat ladies”) of lacking a stake in America’s future, votes against protection for in vitro fertilization and wants higher taxes for childless people. (He later said he had not meant to offend cats.)

Well, that’s the MAGA Republican Party ticket of convicted felon and former president Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. Trump, having normalized overtly racist speech and demonization of immigrants during his campaigns and presidency, now seems bent on making misogyny acceptable, as well.

Indeed, the MAGA movement’s anti-woman outlook relies on a whole pseudo-academic underpinning to justify relegating women to the home as baby-making machines. “Vance, along with his New Right fellow-travelers, is about to introduce voters to a more conceptual take on sexism — one which many women, and indeed many men, might find even more alarming,” Laura K. Field wrote last week for Politico. Field detailed the right-wing groups that have concocted a philosophical framework to propound “a deep skepticism about modern feminism and gender equality”; its aim is “to roll back much of feminism’s gains.”

Their declaration for a “revival of faith, family, and fertility” comes straight from the fascism playbook, which historically has sought to domesticate women and put them under the thumb of their fathers and husbands. “Control over female bodies in the name of population growth is a throughline of authoritarianism, as are persecutions of LGBTQ+ individuals,” writes historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat. “In Europe and America, the century-long focus of the far right on demographic emergencies supposedly created by declines of White births and upticks in non-White immigration have created support for controls on female bodies.” She continues: “These controls are predicated on negating the personhood of women and consigning them to roles as vessels of population growth.”

From the “great replacement theory” to abortion bans, the Make America Great Again movement echoes past demographic freakouts and accompanying efforts to dominate women. As Ben-Ghiat puts it, the MAGA crew, like its intellectual ancestors, insists that for “White Christian civilization to continue, women must be deprived of reproductive rights and demeaned, disciplined, and criminalized if they resist.”

But you don’t have to rely on historians. Project 2025, which Vance has championed and many close Trump advisers put together, explicitly commits to restore the centrality of a male-headed, heterosexual family with children. (“Families composed of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.”) Running through every policy recommendation, the plan gives preference to the “traditional family,” (often called “healthy family”), deeming all other family units as “unnatural.”

Please open the link to finish reading the column.

How smart is it for two men to run for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency by promising to reduce the rights of women and restore them to their traditional role as baby-makers? Some women may like their ideas but most won’t, including a significant number of Republican and independent women. Women are half the population. Women vote.

Categories Bigotry, Elections, Gender, Trump, Vance, J.D.
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »