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Jeff Roush

@JeffRoushPoetry

Mar 17

The use of the word “woke” to mean aware of and awake to the realities and effects of social injustice and racism is far from new. You can go back to at least 1938 and Lead Belly to hear it used that way.
#ResistanceRoots
#LiveBlue

@michaelharriot

Of course conservative whites have worked to co-opt the word, reframing it to refer to rampant political correctness, or really any idea or slice of humanity they don’t support. That tactic is also not new, as the brilliant @michaelharriot describes here:

theroot.com/weaponizing-wo…

The right has turned lexicological acrobatics into an art form, playing word games to dissociate meaning and ideas entirely from their politics. It’s labels, mockery, and schism-creation, all to avoid reckoning with the cruelty and callousness of every policy they support.

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Jeff Roush

@JeffRoushPoetry

Mar 16

The money quote from this article on the Georgia grand jury,: “… if every person in America knew every single word of information we knew, this country would not be as divided as it is right now.” (Thread)
#ResistanceUnited
#LiveBlue2022

ajc.com/politics/exclu…

The MAGA political movement is built on a foundation of outright lies, suppression of truth, and grievance politics. All of this is meant to help a minority hold power by dividing the majority against itself. It’s how every repressive government works.

This is something different from an ideological divide. In any dialectic moment, ideas collide and combine into a new synthesis. But here, one group is hiding and misrepresenting information, rather than letting light shine on its ideas for scrutiny.

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Jeff Roush

@JeffRoushPoetry

Mar 14

I wanted to read this article and feel optimistic. But it shows is that most of those who admit there is no solid evidence for election fraud still choose to believe it anyway. (Thread)
#ResistanceUnited
#LiveBlue2022

washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/…

The right-wing bubble has taught its inhabitants not just that inconvenient facts aren’t real, but that even when they are, it shouldn’t penetrate their foundation-less belief system.

It’s religious adherence to a political party—only more so. Biblically speaking, faith is being “certain of what you have not yet seen.” It isn’t supposed to require denying what you have seen. But that is what the GOP requires of its true believers.

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Jeff Roush

@JeffRoushPoetry

Mar 2

In 1964 in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court adopted an “actual malice” standard for libel lawsuits by public officials. This has always been a difficult standard to reach.
#ResistanceRoots
#LiveBlue2022

oyez.org/cases/1963/39

That case involved errors made in a newspaper ad for fundraising support for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A city commissioner in Alabama won a $500,000 damages award, despite not being named in the ad. The Court reversed—and created a new libel standard for public officials.

Under the Court’s formulation, “actual malice” requires that a false statement be made either with knowledge of or reckless disregard for its falsity. Some conservative organizations, and some Justices they have purchased, have argued that this standard is too high.

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Jeff Roush

@JeffRoushPoetry

Feb 28

@GovBillLee

In Tennessee @GovBillLee is joining many other state governors and legislators in posing as leaders while blindly following right-wing screamers into discriminatory culture wars. (Thread)
#ResistanceUnited
#LiveBlue2022

reuters.com/world/us/tenne…

There is an irony to Lee complaining that questions about his youthful appearance in a cheerleader skirt are “conflating” his boys-will-be-boys fun with “sexualized entertainment in front of children.” So let’s talk conflation.

First, not all drag queens are either gay or trans. Some are one or both, but Tennessee and other states are just lumping them all together into their own imagined den of iniquity.

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Jeff Roush

@JeffRoushPoetry

Feb 1

I had the opportunity last night to attend a local school board emergency session to discuss how to respond to a highly-respected curriculum director recorded and used on a “school choice” propaganda video. (Thread)
#ResistanceUnited
#LiveBlue2022

The video was created by an organization called “Accuracy in Media.” In these Orwellian times, you may surmise what that means. They lied to the school to get a chance to sit with the curriculum director, then sliced and spliced footage into a video.

The closest things they caught to damning information were (1) a statement that if a CRT law were passed, they may have to change the way they label discussion topics; and (2) she used staff development grant funds to purchase “White Fragility” for teachers to read if they chose.

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