Month: January 2022

Apparently, business cannot be required by the government to bake cakes for gay people but they can be required to put their employees and customers lives at risk by serving unvaccinated people.

South Carolina House Bill 4848, also called the “don’t ask” bill, would make questions about a person’s COVID-19 status a misdemeanor crime.

It says, “Notwithstanding another provision of law to the contrary, any employee, officer, agent, or other representative of a public, nonprofit, or private entity who inquires about the COVID-19 vaccination status of any student, employee, member, or anyone else seeking admission on the entity’s premises is guilty of a misdemeanor and, upon conviction, must be fined not more than fourteen thousand dollars or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”

Republican state Rep. Bill Chumley said, “South Carolina didn’t want to get in this fight, It was brought to us by the federal government. States have a right to impose certain laws if they want to, and to not impose others we feel are unconstitutional.”

South Carolina and states’ rights. Some things never change. We even fought a bloody civil war over that very issue and they lost but they still insist on it.

This is purely a situational excuse, however. If a different state wants to require private businesses or citizens to follow some rule they don’t like, the right would be the first in line to start screaming about overbearing government interference and individual rights.

I still find it hard to believe that they are evoking this nonsense in 2021 in order to spread a deadly disease but that’s where we are: a death cult.

Here’s a headline for you:

Ron Johnson Is Unpopular in Wisconsin. Can He Win Anyway?

Lol. Golly, who knows? The election isn’t for 10 more months. Is that really the point?

Anyway, here’s the story:

36% of Wisconsin voters approved of Johnson’s job performance and 51% disapproved in the fourth quarter of 2021.

56% of independent voters in Wisconsin disapproved of Johnson’s job performance — up 14 percentage points since late 2020.

Johnson is widely considered the most vulnerable Republican senator up for re-election this year, but some see a path to victory built on Biden’s own unpopularity and traditional midterm dynamics that favor the party outside the White House.

I’m sure “some see” a path. It’s their job and their hope since he’s the incumbent and they don’t have much choice in the matter. But seriously, that is just a very lame way to frame these findings:

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson emerged from Donald Trump’s presidency with his approval ratings in Wisconsin underwater — and it’s only gotten worse under Joe Biden, even as voters there have soured on the Democratic president. 

But while Johnson is unpopular, few are ready to declare his chances dead on arrival as he revs up his third Senate campaign in a state Trump lost by just a sliver in 2020.

Of course they aren’t ready to declare him dead on arrival. The state is one of the most polarized in the nation and elections are almost always super close. He could pull it out. In fact, any Republican could pull it out under all the new rules, restrictions and partisan officials with which they are stacking the election offices. And 10 months is a long time.

But there is nothing in those numbers right now that suggests it will be close. So headlining this as if Johnson has some magic powers is a bit much.

Here’s hoping the Democrats nominate someone strong for this race. It’s a good possibility for a pick-up, and it doesn’t have to be a Joe Manchin clone. Wisconsin isn’t West Virginia. I’ll be looking forward to seeing who gets the nomination.

Have we ever seen a President attack and malign the free press like Joe Biden has??

— Jim Banks (@RepJimBanks) January 24, 2022

I know. It’s the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever said. Banks, by the way, is the new Chairman of the Freedom Caucus and one of the Republicans Kevin McCarthy tried to foist on the January 6th Committee. I actually feel fairly confident that he is trolling although it’s certainly possible that he is this obtuse. The GOP doesn’t exactly recruit from Mensa these days.

I know this isn’t really necessary but I think it’s important to document this sort of thing for posterity:

“I had a 45-year good relationship with the press, and what the hell happened?” Trump asked Anthony Scaramucci, the short-lived White House communications director, who recalled the moment in an interview with The Washington Post.

“I told him, ‘You declared war! You had Steve Bannon declare war,’ ” recalled Scaramucci, referring to Trump’s former campaign chief and White House adviser. (Scaramucci left the Trump administration after 11 days in office when a tape surfaced of him berating a reporter.)

Some in the White House tried to push back at his broad-brush “fake news” characterizations. Spicer recalled going over stories with the president that had displeased him, assessing them section by section. “We would talk about it,” Spicer told The Post. “He then typically branded it fake.”

Trump spent much of his 2016 campaign beating up on the media. But it wasn’t until after he was inaugurated that he issued something like a formal declaration of war.

One afternoon in February 2017, ensconced at Mar-a-Lago, he deployed his Twitter account to declare with all-caps bombast that the “FAKE NEWS media” is “the enemy of the American people.” He specifically cited the New York Times, CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS.

His statement on that day generated shock in the media world and among his critics. But it caught on with conservative fans who have long nurtured a belief that the mainstream media tilts to the left.

Three years later, the smear has taken hold on conservative websites and in the long lines of supporters outside Trump rallies, functioning like an Internet GIF that cycles endlessly on the screens of the national consciousness.

A master of catchphrases, Trump had created a rallying cry in “enemy of the people” that seems to have penetrated a large part of the national psyche. Already, according to a recent poll, one-third of Americans agree with him that the media is the people’s enemy.

[…]

In recent months, Trump called Chris Wallace, the widely respected host of Fox News Sunday, “nasty and obnoxious,” sniping that he will “never be his father, Mike,” a legendary “60 Minutes” correspondent. He also tarred Peter Baker, a star Times reporter, as “an Obama lover.” And as his Senate impeachment trial got underway, he took a break from the World Economic Forum in Davos to call The Washington Post’s Pulitzer-winning reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig “stone cold losers” on Twitter.

On March 20, NBC’s Peter Alexander asked Trump if his administration had offered “a false sense of hope” in talking up the potential of untested drugs, but then segued to a softball: What would he say to citizens who are afraid of the coronavirus crisis?

“I say that you’re a terrible reporter, that’s what I say,” the president responded. “I think it’s a very nasty question.”

The late Roger Ailes built a whole network in Fox News out of the conservative sense of grievance toward mainstream media. But Trump has taken that mind-set to even greater extremes. “He’s now gotten everyone on the right to use the same terminology and that’s the big change,” Spicer noted.

Trump’s quickness to label stories fake has created new peril for media organizations: Any journalistic misstep or factual error, even if it is speedily corrected, can become a talking point in service of the notion that the media is out to get the president.

“You can’t afford to make mistakes because they will be weaponized against you,” said Doug Heye, a longtime Republican strategist and Trump critic, who fears the president’s rhetoric could imperil the lives of journalists.

The irony is that Trump himself makes false statements — more than 16,000 since taking office, according to a Washington Post Fact Checker tally — that he almost never corrects. Nonetheless, he and his friends and family are quick to pounce on any media stumble — even if the journalists involved have corrected it — and their scorn can ripple out in ever-expanding circles, repeated and re-repeated by his political allies and his 70 million-plus million Twitter followers.

One example was a much-criticized obituary headline in The Washington Post, which appeared online only briefly Oct. 27, but lives forever in the images taken by Post critics. It referred to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as an “austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State” when he was killed. Conservatives blasted the headline for not specifically describing him as a terrorist, though the Islamic State is well-known in the United States as a terrorist organization.

A statement by The Post acknowledging that the headline was a misstep did little to quell the furor. In a profane tweet, Donald Trump Jr. accused The Post of producing “fawning headlines” about “a serial rapist and murderer,” and of “literally doing PR for a terrorist scumbag.”

“Screw you Wa Po!” Trump Jr. wrote.

Michael Caputo, who served as a communications official in Trump’s 2016 campaign, believes the White House and its press corps “have reached a point of no return.” But he finds what he calls the “defensive attacks” on individual reporters “unnerving. We understand that at some point this could go too far.”

Yet attacking the media is now broadly regarded as a smart move by conservatives. In January, while rebuffing his questions about the impeachment proceedings against Trump, Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) called CNN congressional reporter Manu Raju “a liberal hack” — for which the Trump reelection campaign hailed her as a hero (“THIS is how you handle FAKE NEWS”) with a tweet linking to McSally’s campaign fundraising page.

“All of those punches have landed,” said Caputo, who has remained in touch with the president. “In an election cycle, the president will be able to touch some already softened skin.”

Caputo says he has heard references to the term “Fake News” almost everywhere he goes — in Puerto Rico, Germany and Ukraine. An African diplomat recently used the phrase in a conversation with him. “I don’t know if ‘Make America Great Again’ will last forever as a catch phrase,” Caputo said. “But ‘Fake News’? It will endure forever.”

Banks is likely doing a bit of gas lighting as well. I know that it took me a minute to when I read his tweet to calm myself, ask if I was losing my mind, and then regroup and realize he was either brain damaged or just being an asshole. Shamelessness is their superpower.

I admit that this surprises me. All I hear is gloom and doom so the fact that 81% of people who are vaxed are very or mostly satisfied with the vaccines is something of a shock. That over 60% are mostly or very satisfied that they’ve been allowed to return to something like normal is even more shocking. If you watch cable news or look at social media you’d think the whole country was about to explode with frustration at how their lives are hardly worth living in these conditions.

And how about this?

Two new Biden administration initiatives — mailing at-home COVID-19 tests to those who ask and making free N95 masks available — are hugely popular, each backed by 84% of Americans in the latest installment of the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index.

What? The Biden administartion did something right? How can that be?

Of course, the poll also found that those who are unvaccinated are less likely to use masks or take tests so it doesn’t solve that problem. But I doubt anyone thought it did.

This is interesting:

 13% of U.S. adults in our latest survey either said they tested positive for, or believe they got, the virus in the past month. That’s important because it’s about twice the share in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, says Ipsos pollster and senior vice president Chris Jackson.

I’m skeptical that this number is correct because an awful lot of people get sick, don’t get tested and think they have COVID. On the other hand, plenty of people have done home testing recently and they aren’t counted in the numbers so it’s almost definitely higher than the official numbers.

Nobody is happy with this pandemic dragging on. It’s horrifying that so many people are still dying and so many others are getting sick. But whatever inconveniences we are experiencing have been hugely mitigated by the miracle of these vaccines and the treatments that are quickly coming down the pike. We are so very lucky to live in a time that made that possible and we should all be very grateful for that.

Arizona Republicans have drafted two dozen bills for changing election procedures, including adding more layers to the state’s ID requirement. Arizona state Rep. Walt Blackman wants to limit early voting to by-request only and that non-early voting must “take place in a polling place or a center.” Read: no drop boxes, no easy vote-by-mail, etc.

Elvia Díaz of The Arizona Republic continues:

Blackman also wants to require a new voter ID card, which would require a passport or citizenship certificate and other documents, to vote. On top of that, anyone voting in person would also need either fingerprints or a “unique security code” issued to the voter.

Digby asked on Monday, “Why not require a DNA test?”

I proposed that in my first months here. As a joke:

“Just because we haven’t found the example doesn’t mean they aren’t there.” Hans von Spakovsky, True the Vote, and the Voter Integrity Project believe the same thing, and just as firmly.

Come to think of it, underneath their rubber skin, True the Vote members might be Red Lectroids from Planet 10. You know, there could be thousands of them Lectroids on our planet, in our country, and voting illegally in our elections, and we would ever know, would we? Because WE’RE NOT LOOKING. So, DNA tests for every voter, right? I mean, you wouldn’t want Red Lectroids corrupting the integrity of our elections.

That was 2014. In 2022, we’re up to fingerprints and thought police.

Judd Legum writes at Popular Information. “For years, people on the right have complained about the supposed left-wing assault on free speech,” he begins:

Today, Republican state legislators are proposing legislation to restrict what teachers can say in their classrooms. This trend started in 2021 — ten such bills have already become law — but has dramatically accelerated in the first few weeks of this year. A new report by PEN America found that in the first three weeks of 2022 “71 bills have been introduced or prefiled in state legislatures across the country” to restrict the speech of teachers. 

These bills were put together hastily and it shows. In Virginia, a Republican legislator introduced a bill requiring school boards to ensure students understand “the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.” (Lincoln actually debated Stephen Douglas, a very different person.) Other bills contain “contradictory language” or leave “important terms undefined.” Nevertheless, 55% “include some kind of mandatory punishment for violators.” 

Over half call for “mandatory punishment for violators.” Reminiscent of Julia betraying Winston Smith to O’Brien, Virginia’s new governor wants parents to rat-out liberal teachers to the Party state:

“Youngkin also touted a tip line for parents to report to the state any school officials they find to be behaving objectionably — including teaching ‘divisive’ subjects” https://t.co/aiFAZzCjSV pic.twitter.com/qXihsj9DLL

— Rachel Cohen (@rmc031) January 25, 2022

Legum continues:

A particularly aggressive government effort to limit speech is underway in Florida, led by Governor Ron DeSantis (R). A bill championed by DeSantis prohibits any school or private business from engaging in instruction or training that makes anyone “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” on account of their race. 

Critics say the focus on white guilt precludes any candid discussion of American history. “This isn’t even a ban on Critical Race Theory, this is a ban on Black history,” State Senator Shevrin Jones (D) said. “They are talking about not wanting White people to feel uncomfortable? Let’s talk about being uncomfortable. My ancestors were uncomfortable when they were stripped away from their children.”

To wit, the bill explicitly requires teachers to lie to students. It requires teachers to define “American history…as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” At America’s founding, of course, the principles stated in the Declaration of Independence were not universal. Black people, women, and other groups had few rights. 

The Florida bill is a radical attack on free speech in schools and the private sector. But that hasn’t stopped it from moving rapidly through the Republican-controlled legislature. Last week, just seven days after the bill was filed, it was approved by the Senate Education Committee. 

Dozens of similar bills are on the march in state legislatures across the nation.

It is important to recognize that none of this is new. Only more virulent for having gone untreated. It reflects a deep, pre-rational fear of the Other made more urgent by the election of a Black man to the White House in 2008. This is White Christians’ country, by god, and they want it back. Democracy be damned. The only freedom that counts is theirs. They want their right to dominate guaranteed. By minority rule, if necessary.

“This is about putting the fear of God into teachers and administrators,” Jeffrey Sachs, the political scientist behind the PEN report, told Greg Sargent.

The right hopes ultimately to collapse public schools and redirect tax-dollars mandated by state constitutions for universal public education into private (donors’) pockets. Hundreds of billions of dollars per year. But that is just the surface of it.

“Not only for profit schools but tax funded indoctrination is their goal,” tweeted one reader. Yes, that plus preventing their kids’ exposure to people from different religions and cultures, and to ideas different from what they learned at their parents’ and preachers’ knees. They fear losing control.

Again, this is not new. At a 2012 Board of Elections recount hearing here, the chair read aloud from state statutes on the validity of student’s votes being challenged by Republicans. A gerrymandering error by state Republicans had left half the dorms at Warren Wilson College on the wrong side of the line drawn to sequester students safely in the liberal ghetto drawn to make the eastern side of the county more conservative-friendly. The mistake cost Republicans the election. T-party activists argued for over an hour that the law is not the law when they lose. Somebody must have cheated:

At one point, an attendee in support of [Republican candidate] Merrill looked back at a group of Warren Wilson students in the packed meeting room and flashed a piece of paper on which she had written, “You are a law breaker.”

A year later, the Voter Integrity Project of NC held a “boot camp” for amateur voter fraud sleuths. I wrote then:

The sad part is, such legislation and citizen “boot camps” feel like white-knuckled exercises in protecting a demographic patch of electoral turf that’s shrinking beneath supporters’ feet. State after state erects barricades to voting and retreats behind them as for a siege. Not once did any speaker this weekend suggest opening up the franchise to greater participation, registering new voters and encouraging them to go the polls to exercise their right to vote.

The more the demographic walls close in, the crazier they get.

Part 1 here.

Update: Youngkin’s “snitch line” is backfiring.

Pretty crazy. “Republican officials are now mainstreaming the anti-vaxx extremists,” Digby observed on Monday, reflecting on the movment’s hysterical comparisons of vaccines and mask mandates to the Holocaust.

At Medium, Wajahat Ali writes that you may be “done” with Covid, but Covid doesn’t give a shit. To his slam of “grown-ass men and women who lament about wearing masks in public, showing vaccination cards, or forfeiting indoor brunches with their friends,” he adds:

No, these adults aren’t being childish. They are simply acting like assholes. My kids are ages 7, 5, and 2. Yes, even the two-year-old wore a mask without complaint. They are not unique.

Last weekend began with the March for Life and ended at the Lincoln Memorial with a march for death, Dana Milbank observes. Pro-life marchers on Friday chanted, “A child, not a choice.” Anti-vaxx marchers on Sunday proclaimed, “My body, my choice.”

Milbank writes this morning:

The crowds weren’t the same, but collectively, the two rallies captured the hypocrisy of the right at this moment: Protect the unborn, but feel free to infect — and perhaps kill — innocent people already born, including, er, pregnant women. And yet both movements claim to be operating under the authority of “God’s mandate” and “God’s law,” as the anti-vaccine speakers repeatedly put it. God works in mysterious ways, indeed.

In a rare moment of self-awareness at the anti-vaccine rally, JP Sears, the event’s emcee, quipped that because of his belief in natural immunity to the coronavirus, “I kind of feel like a flat-Earther.”

On a related topic, I wrote recently that “Galileo’s private observations, once published, threatened long-held assumptions about how the world worked … More was at stake than astronomy.” His observations questioned the centrality of humans in God’s creation that people had always comfortably assumed. People did not much like having their importance questioned, especially people inside the Vatican. It took Vatican officials 359 years to admit Galileo got it right and they got it wrong.

It’s barely been a century and a half since the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments settled on paper, at least, that White Christians are not the center of economic, religious, and cultural life in America. The backlash over that is not yet done. The more the reality sinks in that Whites are not the apex citizens, the crazier it makes some of them.

The Deathers promised on Sunday to “prosecute — and execute — scientists, political opponents and journalists” they despise for efforts to save human life, Milbank writes. “Pro-lifers, RIP. The pro-death movement is born.”

God help us that they are not the death of this country. Because many would see government of the people, by the people, for the people perish from the earth rather than resign themselves to not ruling the rest of us.

Part 2 here.

Republican officials are now mainstreaming the anti-vaxx extremists. This is quite disturbing

:

It should be noted that these sorts of wild rants about vaccines being genocide constitute the core of Leigh Dundas' speeches. Here she is earlier this month likening them directly to the Holocaust. https://t.co/BkYKOgncfd pic.twitter.com/5Qr2iVdSwi

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) January 24, 2022

These people are truly cracked. How many of them are there?

Hey former White House Trumpers. If you want some help with your legal fees all you have to do is follow Dear Leader’s orders:

Former President Donald Trump‘s team has been involved in discussions about a legal defense fund created to support aides targeted by the House panel investigating January 6, sources tell CNN.While declining to use his own war chest to cover the sky-high legal bills that some of his current and former aides are facing, Trump’s team has instead been working with American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp to determine which individuals subpoenaed by the select committee should receive help from Schlapp’s “First Amendment Fund,” which is run by the ACU’s nonprofit arm.

The January 6 committee formed 6 months ago. Here’s what it’s uncovered.Schlapp told CNN that he is “in communication with [Trump’s] team” about who can and cannot take advantage of the legal fund, which he said has raised “over seven figures” from donors. While Schlapp has not yet rejected any requests, he acknowledged that there will likely come a point where he “will have to make choices on who to fund.”

One of the deciding factors could be how an individual who is seeking financial assistance views the committee.

“We are certainly not going to assist anyone who agrees with the mission of the committee and is aiding and abetting the committee,” Schlapp said. He noted that the fund withholds “the right to make decisions over whether someone gets assistance or doesn’t.”

“I am in communication with [Trump’s] team about those decisions,” he said.Another person familiar with the situation described Trump as “more than aware of this fund,” adding that the former president has been “telling people to take advantage of the Schlapp fund.” […]

The behind-the-scenes coordination between Trump’s team and Schlapp further illustrates how the former President is helping allies navigate congressional investigators, including by connecting them to relief funds depending on the extent of their cooperation and their loyalty to him. Attorneys for the former President previously urged some of his top aides and allies not to comply with the select committee, arguing in an October letter that they were not obliged to submit records or provide testimony related to January 6 because of “executive and other privileges.”

“Aiding and abetting the committee” was previously known as “telling the truth under oath” but I guess that’s just another “norm” that’s been retired.

What I’d like to know is how this isn’t considered witness tampering? Aren’t they basically bribing these people to lie on behalf of Trump?

These anti-vaxxers are something else:

A hodgepodge of Trumpworld superfans, disillusioned Democrats, far-right extremists, self-identifying independents, and street preachers assembled Sunday morning to rally against equal parts COVID-19 vaccines and mandates.

The event started at the Washington Monument, with attendees making the trek to Lincoln Memorial to hear from many anti-vax superstars, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., controversial virologist Dr. Robert Malone, and Fox Nation’s Lara Logan, who has been ghosted by her employer.

Ahead of the march to the Lincoln Memorial, attendees gathered to speak with each other and hold sporadic demonstrations, including dancing and chanting to anti-vax rap songs.

Far-right fanatics were out in full force, from the extremist members of the hate group Proud Boy to rank-and-file supporters who consume everything that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones utters.

John Kopel, a staunch advocate against COVID-19 vaccines and an InfoWars loyalist, told The Daily Beast ahead of the rally he is a “fan of Alex Jones.” Carrying a sign that promoted Jones’ media entity and claimed “[Dr. Anthony] Fauci is a mass murderer,” Kopel said that he remains upset with former President Trump’s initial push of what he calls the “bio-weapon.” The rally-goer added that Trump’s endorsement of the vaccine is a “serious issue.” “We are for medical freedom,” he continued before suggesting that Trump might have been “corrupted.”

But it wasn’t only right-wingers in attendance, as many self-identifying Democrats and others also showed up to the event.

Clare Tobin, a lifelong Democratic voter from Chicago, voiced her frustrations with politicians pushing mandates and vaccines. “I don’t trust the vaccine,” she said. “You can’t even trust the Democrats, either. They all have the same message. They all had the same agenda.”

Then there was the straight-up bizarre, which included one attendee dressing up as Uncle Sam with a vaccine going through his top hat.

Elliot Crown, from New York, who dressed in garb resembling Uncle Sam, told The Daily Beast he was there to protest Americans’ “rights being curtailed,” citing the pandemic as a “fraud.” “They [both Democrats and Republicans] are taking orders, it is a global thing. They all use the same phrase ‘Build Back Better.’”

Along the march route, attendees were also enticed to buy Trump paraphernalia, given religious books, and encouraged to take a free nasal spray that promises to cure anyone of the coronavirus if they are infected. Xlear CEO Nathan Jones, whose company sells the spray and has been sued by the FTC, was in attendance and baselessly claimed to The Daily Beast that his nasal solution “works” on COVID-19, adding that “just using saltwater [will] stop the spread of COVID-19 in the lungs.”

[…]

During the event, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a bonkers Holocaust analogy, a theme from the day’s activists as attendees brought comparable messaging along with them on signs. “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did,” he told the crowd.

Not satisfied with just vaccine disinformation, RFK Jr launches into a riff about satellites and 5G being used by global elites to control the world’s population and cut off food supplies. pic.twitter.com/QSzhVCKxPn

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 23, 2022

I have often compared the Trump phenomenon to a Grateful Dead concert as a way to illustrate that it’s more of a tribal gathering than just a place to see your idols. I think this from the anti-vax crowd yesterday is more on the nose than I anticipated. (Of course, some of those people would actually be at a Grateful Dead concert, if they still had them — they aren’t all right wingers.)

Musical entertainment at the anti-vax rally in DC. From @FordFischer pic.twitter.com/Q1Jpsd16bJ

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 23, 2022

Greg Sargent on the latest assault on public school teachers:

Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial election persuaded Republicans that there’s political gold in attacking teachers for supposedly indoctrinating the nation’s children about race. So in GOP-controlled state legislatures, efforts to place new restrictions on teachers are accelerating.

But behind these efforts lie specific trends that could prove particularly toxic. The risk: They may make teachers believe they are on such thin ice that they end up whitewashing the U.S. past rather than dare to communicate hard truths about it.

That’s the key takeaway from a new report from PEN America on the latest batch of restrictions moving forward in GOP legislatures. The report shows that these efforts are expanding and getting more pedagogically pernicious in their goals.

The report’s top-line finding: Dozens of proposals have already been introduced this month to limit how our nation’s racial past and present are taught. That’s striking enough, but what’s underneath these efforts also matters.

There are three important features of these efforts, the report finds. The first is sloppy drafting: Many leave terminology vaguely defined, such as the idea that certain “concepts” are in some vague sense off limits. The second: Many explicitly target teachers’ speech and require direct punishment of speech that’s deemed a violation.

The third: Many come with a “private right of action,” allowing parents and citizens to seek to levy their own punishments against teachers, such as suing them in court. Put all this together, and the aim seems to go beyond the traditional exercise of state authority to set curriculums.

Instead, this seems to treat teachers as subversive internal threats who must be zealously rooted out at any deviation from orthodoxy. The vague drafting of prohibited concepts, combined with threats of action and/or punishment, seem structured to make educators feel constantly at risk, chilling the range of discussion.

“This is about putting the fear of God into teachers and administrators,” Jeffrey Sachs, the political scientist who authored the new report, told me. “Teachers are going to avoid discussing certain topics altogether — topics related to race, sex and American history that as a society we might want to discuss.”

And then there’s this from the media’s favorite so-called moderate Republican:

A level of statewide chaos unprecedented in recent memory is looming for Virginia schools, as a new Republican governor prepares to enforce a mask-optional mandate on Monday that many superintendents and parents have vowed to fight, or to uphold, with all the ammunition they can muster.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who is just more than a week into his governorship, issued an executive order on his first day in office delegating to parents the decision on whether children wear masks at school. The order, which contravenes federal health guidance and masking requirements maintained by the vast majority of Virginia school districts throughout the coronavirus pandemic, is in keeping with Youngkin’s campaign promise to give parents greater control over all aspects of their children’s education.

The order is supposed to take effect Monday for all of Virginia’s roughly 130 school districts and more than 1.5 million public and private schoolchildren. But it has already plunged Youngkin into a bitter war with significant swaths of the public school system: Within days of the order’s announcement, superintendents in the suburbs just outside D.C. and in Youngkin’s new home, Richmond, promised to keep requiring masks. In response, Virginia’s lieutenant governor said Youngkin could pull funding from disobedient districts. A group of parents also sued to reverse the order, and Youngkin filed to dismiss their suit.

Schools have been a battle ground in the culture wars for decades. This is not new and I’m shocked that so many people of a certain age seem to have amnesia about that fact. (I don’t blame young people — nobody told them) This is one of their favorite strategies and they do it ALL THE TIME.

COVID and the made-up CRT controversy have added to a sense of urgency and I think they see their chance to advance their agenda. But don’t kid yourself, their overarching goal is to privatize public schools so they can indoctrinate kids their own way without interference. It’s always been their goal.

Teachers are public employees, they are unionized and they are predominately female and racially diverse. What could be a bigger enemy to the right than that? This kind of pressure is designed to chase good teachers out of the field and further degrade the institutions. They are already laboring with low pay, little respect and micromanaging the classroom. This assault from parents and politicians over closures and masking is likely to be the last straw for many. These are educated people. They can find other jobs in this market. And nothing will make the right wing happier.