Not quite ready for those who will proclaim the verdict to be a miscarriage of justice, but you know it's coming and you know why they will say it.
You, a fool: Hmm - the carceral state maintains structures of power by using state resources to target historically marginalized groups.
Michael Tracey, a genius: actually the carceral state is any punishment of state actors who murder members of marginalized groups.
None of these clout chasers are going to come out and say that it's ok to murder someone in broad daylight. No, no. They are just concerned about due process in the criminal justice system. About media coverage being fair. Thats all it is.
Serial peddler of conspiracy theories, including pizzagate, decries "national disgrace" after decision and calls on cops to stop enforcing the law after cop convicted of murder that everyone saw him commit.
White nationalist bemoans fact that white cop cannot kill Black man with impunity, denies that such an outcome could reflect a functioning justice system. Instead: "the country as we know it is over."
The easiest way to understand the trend toward the criminalization of protest is that the Republican Party has grown increasingly comfortable in using state power to tamp down dissent - in other words it has become more authoritarian. 2/ washingtonpost.com/business/2020/…
Apart from criminalizing protest, some other salient measures of current GOP authoritarianism:
*unwillingness to punish actual attacks on democracy
*seeking to overturn elections
*constraining voting rights
*state policing dissenting speech at universities and schools
FL, where the state:
*has made it easy to turn protest against police action into a felony conviction, which will cause protestors to lose voting rights
*the police instruct you how to vote
*you can't talk about this in a classroom because critical race theory is banned
FL, where the state (ok, really the GOP):
*overrode a referendum that saw two-thirds of the public say former felons should get voting rights back but God forbid you talk about race and power in a classroom
If you are a faculty in a university, a proposed new law will survey your political beliefs, and encourage students to record you what you say. The state is narrowing, policing and in some cases criminalizing dissent against abuses of state power.
This is really great: USCIS is seeking public input on how to minimize administrative burdens for immigrants. Please share widely! federalregister.gov/documents/2021…
If you've been paying any attention to immigration over the last few years, you know the Trump admin has been using administrative barriers to make even legal processes impossible to access. See, for example, work by @crampellwashingtonpost.com/opinions/lette…
See also this piece by @stillsarita: While the Trump admin emphasized the need for legal immigration, they did everything they could to shut down those legal processes under a mountain of red tape. newyorker.com/magazine/2021/…
Journalism is partly about framing what is and is not important. We have some journalists who have made a whole beat on stories of excess campus wokeness, but its hard to think of anyone who has done the same on stories of state power policing campus speech, which are more impt
There are journalists who report on, for example, bills that restrict speech on campus, but who do not see their job as critiquing them. And there are some academics who try to make sense of these trends and explain the risks to free speech, e.g.
Some opinion people will write on this topic occasionally, but it's not their main beat, e.g. @michelleinbklyn@zackbeauchamp. But there isn't a whole cohort of writers/podcasters on the topic of state threats to campus speech in the way there is for the anti-wokeness brigade.
We’ve gone pretty quickly from “please wear a mask even when outdoors” to “those people wearing masks outdoors are obnoxious freaks”
We have a population that is far from fully vaccinated and the new variants are more contagious. I don’t think we are quite at the point where we should be shaming people if they decide to wear masks.
We are at a delicate moment where people are renegotiating the space around them - eg trying to discover which friends are vaccinated. The CDC has been said if everyone is vaccinated, no need for masks. If you are outdoors it’s likely fine. Short of that, still some uncertainty.
Not sure about this framing. Have not seen any Biden supporters argue that low refugees numbers is an enlightened policy now that Biden is doing it: indeed, most of the pushback on this policy I’ve seen is coming from liberals who presumably voted for him
There are aspects of the immigration discussion where Biden has probably been unfairly treated e.g. the very real problem of what to do with unaccompanied minors. But the refugee cap does not fall into that category as best as I can tell. (but correct me if I'm wrong).