“GOP crusade against anti-racist education has left impressionable white kids unprotected from threat of white supremacists sliding into their feeds, games, DMs—into their minds.
& Republican politicians are doing all of this while insisting that they care about white children”
“The Republican attacks on what they call “critical race theory” aren’t about protecting white kids, or any kids at all.
The attacks are intended to deceive, aggrieve, and mobilize enough white donors and voters to win contested elections this year and beyond.”
“Republican operatives have been most likely to organize “don’t say race” campaigns in schools located in swing districts, particularly where a majority-white school population is rapidly diversifying.”
“This means that students in racially mixed communities whose parents are arguing over politics may particularly be restricted from learning together about complex issues,” UCLA researchers explained.
“Right now, our fear about addressing race causes us to leave kids guessing,” Shelly Tochluk, an education professor at Mount Saint Mary’s University.
“They fill in the blanks with whatever they see online, and this includes horrifically twisted messages from white nationalists”
“caregivers need to start asking different questions.
Instead of asking, Should kids learn about race? they should be asking, Whom do I want teaching kids about race?
Trained educators in schools?
Loving parents in homes?
Or white supremacists in virtual “classrooms”?
“The Republican Party is not the party of parents raising girls, raising trans kids, raising kids of color, raising queer kids, raising poor kids, raising immigrant kids.
The Republican Party is making it harder for all of these kids to learn about themselves and their histories
“The Republican Party is stripping parents and educators of their collective ability to protect vulnerable children from being indoctrinated by—or victimized by—the scourge of white supremacy.”
“Instead of combatting white supremacists, the Republican Party has harbored white supremacists, has mainstreamed their mantra that anti-racism is antiwhite, and has embraced a president who has called them “very fine people,”
“has told this growing army on national television to “stand back and stand by,” has incited them to attack the Capitol, has defended their carnage, and has urged the American people to move on from the greatest domestic terrorist threat of our time.”
“This Republican Party is not the party of any group of parents,
but the party of white supremacy.”
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“norms & institutions of political participation that developed during long era of mass communication are not going to work well now that tech has made everything so much faster & more multidirectional & when bypassing professional gatekeepers is so easy” theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
“And yet American democracy is now operating outside the bounds of sustainability.
If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis.”
“We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.”
“More than 2,300 service members are currently assigned to drone crews.
Early in the program, they said, missions seemed well run.
Officials carefully chose their targets and took steps to minimize civilian deaths.”
“We would watch a high-value target for months, gathering intelligence and waiting for the exact right time to strike,” said James Klein, a former Air Force captain who flew Reapers at Creech from 2014 to 2018.
“Cities Try to Turn the Tide on Police Traffic Stops -
Chiefs, prosecutors and lawmakers are rethinking the value, and the harm, of minor traffic stops like the one that ended in a man’s death in Grand Rapids.”
“LA is overhauling its traffic policing, aiming to stop pulling over cars — frequently with Black drivers — for trivial infractions like broken taillights or expired tags as a pretext to search for drugs or guns.
“We want to fish with a hook, not a net,” Police Chief Moore said
“LA last month became the biggest city to restrict the policing of minor violations.
In Philadelphia, a ban on such stops has just taken effect. Pittsburgh; Seattle; Berkeley, Calif.; Lansing, Mich.; Brooklyn Center, Minn.; and the State of Virginia have all taken similar steps”
“Murder rates are still 30 percent lower than they were during the previous peaks between the 1970s and ’90s.
“I don’t think the Wild West days of the ’70s and ’80s are coming back,” said John Roman, a senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago.
“More distance from the police violence and protests of 2020 could also ease police-community tensions.
(This seemed to happen before: Murders spiked in 2015 and 2016 after protests over police brutality, then murder rates leveled off, before spiking again in 2020.)”
"The kind of elections occurring in Nov—that is, everything but presidential—may also be a factor.
“Probably the politician that people associate most with abortion restrictions is the president, even though senators vote to confirm judges. So it’s a little harder to predict"
"If GOP take control of the Senate and, say, Clarence Thomas were to retire or die or something, there probably wouldn’t be any new nominee confirmed if @JoeBiden was in the White House.
And you could theoretically imagine a Republican Congress passing a statute banning abortion
“what makes them reliable — they’re stories audiences are already interested in, because they’ve been told before — makes it hard for them to be more than digestible versions of things that already exist, the video equivalent of audiobooks.” nytimes.com/2022/04/12/art…
“Truth may be buzzier than fiction right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s as interesting.”
“Meanwhile, scripted TV is in a curious place.
There are so many platforms, needing so much material, that there is theoretically more room than ever for innovation.”