The Right's Assault on Facts, Data, and Reality

[LFC]

Here's a suggestion on how to respond when a Republican makes false accusations of fraud because they lost an election. I like it.

First, we should understand that we don't have to accept the premise. What premise? That GOP losers are raising doubts about democracy's legitimacy. (Yes, I'm contradicting myself, but go with it, please.) When GOP losers like Larry Elder, or the former president, accuse election officials of rigging elections, we don't have to accept the premise. Instead, we can present our own — that he's conceding defeat.

That might sound strange. After all, a candidate concedes when a candidate actually concedes — when they say the words, "I'm done." But there are no rules here. Democracy empowers us to get creative. When a GOP loser tells supporters they should doubt the results of the election, we don't have to accept that they're raising doubts about the election. We can instead say they are giving up, not only on the election, but on America. When GOP losers give up on America, there's nothing saying that America should keep working on a relationship that's clearly not getting better. America should give up on them.

There's also nothing saying that we must give them a second chance. Republican losers have the right to tell their supporters to distrust democracy's outcomes. The rest of us have the right to conclude that we should never trust that candidate with power. Ever. The same goes for partisan allies. Some lines can't be crossed. If they are, there's no coming back. If a Republican loser, like the former president, attempts a comeback, we have the right to declare that his opinions are forfeit.

He can shut the fuck up.

Again, the same goes for partisan allies. For instance, Marco Rubio. The United States senator from Florida issued a letter expressing "grave concern" about the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to the Post, Mark Milley was so concerned Donald Trump would start a war with China he contacted his counterpart there to make sure it didn't happen. What Milley did is extraordinary. Everyone committed to the republic should and will be giving his actions a lot of hard thought. But Marco Rubio voted to acquit the former president of treason.

He can shut the fuck up.

Other Republicans and their allies in the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, are expressing a range of opinion about Milley's questionable conduct, everything from "grave concern" to allegations of treason. But these partisans want us to take their views seriously, as if they mean anything they say, as if they are dedicated to democracy, as if insubordination were truly offensive to them, as if they did not actually support the former president's attempted coup.

They can shut the fuck up.

There really is no reason to engage with them over the facts. "They lost so they lie!" is more appropriate. "They can't win so they cheat!" is another. And never stop attacking them.

[LFC]

Bannon happily admits what was in the Woodward & Costa book, he pushed Trump to lie and try to delegitimize the Biden presidency.

With glee, former Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon confirmed on Wednesday that he helped former President Trump plan the Jan. 6 insurrection as part of an effort to “kill the Biden presidency in the crib.”

The Trump adviser made the comments on a Wednesday episode of his War Room: Pandemic, confirming reporting in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book Peril.

Bannon played a clip on his podcast of the two Washington Post reporters discussing the book on MSNBC, in which Costa said that in the days leading up to the insurrection, Bannon “privately told President Trump to have a reckoning on January 6th.”

“And he said to the president, it’s time to kill the Biden presidency in the crib,” Costa added.

Bannon then cut the clip, and said on the podcast: “Yeah, because it’s about legitimacy.”

“Let’s look at the Economist poll, not Revolver, not The War Room – 42 percent of the American people think that Biden did not win the presidency legitimately,” he added.

Bannon’s view, garbled through his own puffery and bizarre manner of speaking, also appears to confirm the book’s reporting that he told Trump that the day should be a “reckoning.” Unsurprisingly, Bannon’s remarks manage to both posit the insurrection as a legitimate revolt while also placing himself at the center of events.

It’s another piece of evidence that further ties Trump to violence at the Capitol, which occurred as Trump gave a rally repeating the Big Lie and telling his audience to go “fight” as members of Congress formalized Biden’s win.

[goldenvalley]

Sept 23, 2021 20:32:31 GMT LFC said:

Bannon happily admits what was in the Woodward & Costa book, he pushed Trump to lie and try to delegitimize the Biden presidency.

With glee, former Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon confirmed on Wednesday that he helped former President Trump plan the Jan. 6 insurrection as part of an effort to “kill the Biden presidency in the crib.”

The Trump adviser made the comments on a Wednesday episode of his War Room: Pandemic, confirming reporting in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book Peril.

Bannon played a clip on his podcast of the two Washington Post reporters discussing the book on MSNBC, in which Costa said that in the days leading up to the insurrection, Bannon “privately told President Trump to have a reckoning on January 6th.”

“And he said to the president, it’s time to kill the Biden presidency in the crib,” Costa added.

Bannon then cut the clip, and said on the podcast: “Yeah, because it’s about legitimacy.”

“Let’s look at the Economist poll, not Revolver, not The War Room – 42 percent of the American people think that Biden did not win the presidency legitimately,” he added.

Bannon’s view, garbled through his own puffery and bizarre manner of speaking, also appears to confirm the book’s reporting that he told Trump that the day should be a “reckoning.” Unsurprisingly, Bannon’s remarks manage to both posit the insurrection as a legitimate revolt while also placing himself at the center of events.

It’s another piece of evidence that further ties Trump to violence at the Capitol, which occurred as Trump gave a rally repeating the Big Lie and telling his audience to go “fight” as members of Congress formalized Biden’s win.

We should be happy that Trump got jealous of Bannon early in the presidency and banished him.  Bannon would have provided Trump with more destructive focus than Trump alone was ever capable of.

[LFC]

The right-wingnuts are already coming out in force with their lies trying to attach the nutjob who rammed into a parade in Wisconsin to Black Lives Matter. Alternative facts are alive and well in the white supremacist world of the right-wingnuts a.k.a. the Republican Party.

For now, there are no indications of any additional motive for driving his SUV through the parade, or any reasons to label it domestic terrorism, Waukesha police chief Daniel Thompson said in a press conference Monday afternoon. “We are confident that he acted alone,” Thompson added.

But a quick glance on social media would find an entirely different narrative playing out. Scores of accounts, some with hundreds of thousands of followers, are either insinuating or stating outright Brooks was in some way a member of Black Lives Matter, or had been inspired by the civil rights group. Others suggested without evidence this was the first shot in a looming race war, or that Brooks’s alleged crimes were somehow an act of retribution days after Kyle Rittenhouse was declared not guilty.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon-friendly and vaccine-hesitant member of Congress, tweeted, “we must ask if [BLM] incited the mass murder.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸
@mtgreenee
After the widespread hateful reaction to the Rittenhouse verdict & dog whistle calls to radical BLM ground troops by the mainstream media, Democrats, and even the President of the United States, we must ask if they incited the mass murder in Waukesha, WI.

Intentional homicide.

She also shared and endorsed a post by Pedro Gonzales, a fellow at the Claremont Institute, blaming the “US media” for inspiring Brooks, a “black nationalist.” Laura Loomer, who has been banned from almost every platform for sharing islamophobic sentiments, went further, answering the quetion that Greene “asked”: “From the moment this happened I said it was a black supremacist Muslim who carried out a terror attacking against WHITE PEOPLE,” she posted on Telegram.

All those evidently misleading and claims about Brooks’ motives (he identified as a Christian in other Facebook posts, according to The Daily Dot) came after Ngo, a prominent far-right figure and editor-at-large for The Post Millennial, put up a thread late on Sunday which circulated widely. After a New York Post reporter identified Brooks as the individual taken into custody and linked to his police record, Ngo went to work, sharing a photo of a prior mugshot. (Ngo regularly posts mugshots of leftist protesters.)

As a side note look how the Democrats handled one of their own. Can you imagine what would have happened if the script was flipped? The asshole wouldn't have been fired, they would have been put on Faux News.

A Democratic Party staffer in Illinois has been fired after sparking outrage with her “callous” take on the deadly Christmas parade attack in Waukesha, Wisconsin. The DuPage Democratic Party announced the news in a statement late Monday, saying they had “severed all ties” with Mary Lemanski once they saw “her callous and reprehensible posts” about the attack that left five people dead and nearly 50 others injured Sunday. Lemanski, who was the social-media director for the party in the county, had used the attack to criticize the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse. “Living in Wisconsin, he probably felt threatened,” Lemanski wrote, referring to Rittenhouse’s defense for shooting three protesters. “I just believe in Karma and this came around quick on the citizens of Wisconsin,” she reportedly wrote, adding that “you reap what you sow.”

[goldenvalley]

Nov 23, 2021 20:07:01 GMT LFC said:

The right-wingnuts are already coming out in force with their lies trying to attach the nutjob who rammed into a parade in Wisconsin to Black Lives Matter. Alternative facts are alive and well.

What about Antifa?  I would ask about the socialists/communists/Marxists but I guess BLM is reputedly tied in with Marxists. Sorry can't read the paywalled article.

[LFC]

Ted Cruz (American / Canadian asshole) continued his war on reality by demanding that Dr. Anthony Fauci (American hero) be investigated over the bogus right-wing conspiracy theory about Wuhan funding. Fauci dug in the spurs on Treason Ted.

White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci brushed off Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) demand for Attorney General Merrick Garland to prosecute the nation’s top infectious diseases expert amid GOP outrage over Fauci’s statements on COVID-19.

During an interview on CBS that aired Sunday, Fauci was asked about his response to Cruz claiming in a tweet last month that he had asked Garland to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Fauci. Alongside other GOP senators, Cruz accused Fauci of lying when the White House chief medical adviser in May denied that the National Institutes of Health funded “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China — a type of research that enhances a virus in a lab to study its potential impact in the real world.

Fauci laughed off Cruz’s demand.

“I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?” Fauci said, appearing to jab Cruz and other GOP senators for boosting former President Trump’s Big Lie of a “stolen” election by challenging the election results, which in turn led to the deadly Capitol insurrection.

Fauci said that Cruz’s attacks are part of an effort to make him a scapegoat to deflect from Trump’s disastrous COVID-19 response.

“Of course, you have to be asleep not to figure that one out,” Fauci said.

Fauci went on to brush off Republicans’ attacks over his denial that the NIH funded “gain of function” research.

“That’s OK, I’m just going to do my job and I’m going to be saving lives and they’re going to be lying,” Fauci said.

Fauci went on to criticize GOP lawmakers’ politicization of COVID-19 by spreading misinformation.

“I mean, anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this,” Fauci said. “So if they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about.”

Fauci also took aim at Republicans who target him for following the science.

“But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people could recognize there’s a person there. There’s a face, there’s a voice you can recognize, you see him on television,” Fauci said. “So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous. To me, that’s more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at me.”

“I’m not going to be around here forever, but science is going to be here forever. And if you damage science, you are doing something very detrimental to society long after I leave,” Fauci continued. “And that’s what I worry about.”

[LFC]

American traitor, Trumpian grifter, and disgrace to his uniform Michael Flynn knew that QAnon was brimming with bullshit but that didn't stop him from pushing it for fun and profit. This makes him an even bigger steaming pile than if he were only batshit nuts ... which I still firmly believe he is.

LOL

Former Trump adviser-turned-QAnon superstar Michael Flynn told pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood, who’s now at war with Flynn and other MAGA minions, that the QAnon conspiracy theory that Trump’s secretly fighting a cabal of baby-eating pedophiles in elite circles is “total nonsense.”

• During a phone call with Wood, who published a recording of the call on Telegram on Saturday, Flynn said QAnon was a “a disinformation campaign created by the left.”

• It’s unclear when exactly the call took place. The Daily Beast notes that Flynn told Wood about an article by a white supremacist (yep!) that was published on Nov. 2, so the conversation might’ve taken place around then.

• Take a listen:

• Flynn made a pretty penny off QAnon, by the by. Also this happened:

[goldenvalley]

This is the US of A. Crazy people get to make money too??  I am yet again shocked at how people seem to like to be conned and are willing to part with money in order to indulge their fantasies.

[LFC]

Short blurb on TPM illustrating IOKIYAR and a total lack of self awareness.

Jettisoned Trump White House Lackey Has Serious Thoughts

Reince Priebus, Trump’s first chief of staff who lasted a whole six months, tsk-tsked yesterday at the news that Simone Sanders, top adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, is leaving the White House:

Man, it’s a good thing Reince never experienced any unexpected White House departures or got nicknames like “Rancid Penis” by Trump’s head communications director.

[LFC]

Texass has been blocked from turning every social media platform into the kind of cesspools that 4chan, 8chan, and Parler instantly became.

A federal judge yesterday blocked a Texas state law that bans "censorship" on social media platforms, ruling that the law violates the social networks' First Amendment right to moderate user-submitted content.

"Social media platforms have a First Amendment right to moderate content disseminated on their platforms," Judge Robert Pitman wrote. He found that the Texas law "compels social media platforms to disseminate objectionable content and impermissibly restricts their editorial discretion" and that the law's "prohibitions on 'censorship' and constraints on how social media platforms disseminate content violate the First Amendment."

Pitman's ruling granted a preliminary injunction requested by tech industry groups NetChoice and the Computer & Communications & Industry Association (CCIA), which sued Texas in US District Court for the Western District of Texas. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and various other tech companies belong to the groups.

The injunction prohibits the Texas attorney general from enforcing the law. The judge found that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their case, a prerequisite for granting a preliminary injunction.

Pitman rejected a severability clause that aimed to save parts of the law if the rest was invalidated. He found that nothing can be severed from the law and survive because the unconstitutional portions are "replete with constitutional defects, including unconstitutional content and speaker-based infringement on editorial discretion and onerously burdensome disclosure and operational requirements."

"This ruling upholds the First Amendment and protects Internet users," CCIA President Matt Schruers said yesterday. "Without this temporary injunction, Texas's social media law would make the Internet a more dangerous place by tying the hands of companies protecting users from abuse, scams, or extremist propaganda... The First Amendment ensures that the government can't force a citizen or company to be associated with a viewpoint they disapprove of, and that applies with particular force when a state law would prevent companies from enforcing policies against Nazi propaganda, hate speech, and disinformation from foreign agents."

When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the bill in September, he claimed the law is needed to protect Texans' First Amendment rights against "a dangerous movement by social media companies to silence conservative viewpoints and ideas." Florida tried to impose a similar social media law but it was also blocked by a federal judge for violating the First Amendment.

The transparency of the Texass Republicans' is pretty obvious.

Pitman noted that Texas lawmakers excluded conservative social networks Parler and Gab by applying the law only to platforms with 50 million or more monthly active users in the US. One state senator "unsuccessfully proposed lowering the threshold to 25 million monthly users in an effort to include" sites like Parler and Gab, Pitman wrote.

[goldenvalley]

Birds Aren't Real.  Despite the name and opening paragraph this article belongs here, not in Humor or Birds.  Some young people created a fine parody of conspiracy theory.

In Pittsburgh, Memphis and Los Angeles, massive billboards recently popped up declaring, “Birds Aren’t Real.”

On Instagram and TikTok, Birds Aren’t Real accounts have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers, and YouTube videos about it have gone viral.

Last month, Birds Aren’t Real adherents even protested outside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to demand that the company change its bird logo.

The events were all connected by a Gen Z-fueled conspiracy theory, which posits that birds don’t exist and are really drone replicas installed by the U.S. government to spy on Americans. Hundreds of thousands of young people have joined the movement, wearing Birds Aren’t Real T-shirts, swarming rallies and spreading the slogan.

It might smack of QAnon, the conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by an elite cabal of child-trafficking Democrats. Except that the creator of Birds Aren’t Real and the movement’s followers are in on a joke: They know that birds are, in fact, real and that their theory is made up.

What Birds Aren’t Real truly is, they say, is a parody social movement with a purpose. In a post-truth world dominated by online conspiracy theories, young people have coalesced around the effort to thumb their nose at, fight and poke fun at misinformation. It’s Gen Z’s attempt to upend the rabbit hole with absurdism.

“It’s a way to combat troubles in the world that you don’t really have other ways of combating,” said Claire Chronis, 22, a Birds Aren’t Real organizer in Pittsburgh. “My favorite way to describe the organization is fighting lunacy with lunacy.”

This group has plans beyond showing up at protests and selling merchandise.  

Mr. McIndoe now has big plans for 2022. Breaking character is necessary to help Birds Aren’t Real leap to the next level and forswear actual conspiracy theorists, he said. He added that he hoped to collaborate with major content creators and independent media like Channel 5 News, which is aimed at helping people make sense of America’s current state and the internet.

“I have a lot of excitement for what the future of this could be as an actual force for good,” he said. “Yes, we have been intentionally spreading misinformation for the past four years, but it’s with a purpose. It’s about holding up a mirror to America in the internet age.”

A comment following the article had me laughing:

B.I.R.D. -- Bio-tronic Intelligence Reconnaissance Drone.

R.A.V.E.N -- Reconnaissance Airborne Vigilance Enforcement Network.

C.R.O.W -- Covert Robotic Observation Web

Hidden in plain sight. What turkeys we've been!

 

[Bact PhD]

Dec 10, 2021 17:31:08 GMT goldenvalley said:

Birds Aren't Real.  Despite the name and opening paragraph this article belongs here, not in Humor or Birds.  Some young people created a fine parody of conspiracy theory.

In Pittsburgh, Memphis and Los Angeles, massive billboards recently popped up declaring, “Birds Aren’t Real.”

On Instagram and TikTok, Birds Aren’t Real accounts have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers, and YouTube videos about it have gone viral.

Last month, Birds Aren’t Real adherents even protested outside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to demand that the company change its bird logo.

The events were all connected by a Gen Z-fueled conspiracy theory, which posits that birds don’t exist and are really drone replicas installed by the U.S. government to spy on Americans. Hundreds of thousands of young people have joined the movement, wearing Birds Aren’t Real T-shirts, swarming rallies and spreading the slogan.

“It’s a way to combat troubles in the world that you don’t really have other ways of combating,” said Claire Chronis, 22, a Birds Aren’t Real organizer in Pittsburgh. “My favorite way to describe the organization is fighting lunacy with lunacy.”

This group has plans beyond showing up at protests and selling merchandise.  

Mr. McIndoe now has big plans for 2022. Breaking character is necessary to help Birds Aren’t Real leap to the next level and forswear actual conspiracy theorists, he said. He added that he hoped to collaborate with major content creators and independent media like Channel 5 News, which is aimed at helping people make sense of America’s current state and the internet.

[snip]

“I have a lot of excitement for what the future of this could be as an actual force for good,” he said. “Yes, we have been intentionally spreading misinformation for the past four years, but it’s with a purpose. It’s about holding up a mirror to America in the internet age.”

A comment following the article had me laughing:

B.I.R.D. -- Bio-tronic Intelligence Reconnaissance Drone.

R.A.V.E.N -- Reconnaissance Airborne Vigilance Enforcement Network.

C.R.O.W -- Covert Robotic Observation Web

Hidden in plain sight. What turkeys we've been!

 

Damn! Dear Son is going to be mad that he didn’t come up with this himself!

[LFC]

[LFC]

McCarthy goes to bat for MGT's lies.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on Monday took aim at Twitter a day after the social media platform permanently suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) personal account, which the far-right lawmaker had used to claim that the COVID-19 vaccines were causing people to die.

McCarthy did not mention Greene by name, but issued a diatribe complaining about “recent decisions to silence Americans” including “a sitting member of Congress” because, in his words, these banned individuals “share views different from the political and media elite.”

McCarthy goes on to compare COVID-19 deniers and anti-vaxxers to an array of unnamed Democrats and media figures and to Vice President Kamala Harris, and to claim that Twitter had, with its account suspensions, censored “first amendment protected free speech.”

“On the other end of the spectrum, Americans on the political left, including popular cable news hosts, members of Congress, and even the Vice President have themselves made public comments that are now universally understood to be false. Yet, they face no repercussions from the gatekeepers of America’s town square,” McCarthy said. “It is clear any speech that does not fit Big Tech’s orthodoxy gets muzzled.”

Kevin McCarthy blows goats. Don't censor me because I "share views different from the right-wing political and media elite."

[LFC]

Republican fascists (but I repeat myself) in Indiana seek to bash those political systems they hate in public schools through a new law. One state senator who is a sponsor went so far as to exclude Nazism and fascism from the same bashing. Then we had the babbling backpedal.

An Indiana state senator who is facing criticism for saying teachers must be impartial when discussing Nazism is walking back his remarks.

Indiana state Sen. Scott Baldwin said he wasn’t clear when he said a bill he filed at the Indiana Statehouse would require teachers to be impartial in their teaching of all subjects, including during lessons about Nazism, Marxismand fascism.

During a committee hearing Wednesday about Senate Bill 167, a wide-ranging bill inspired by the national discourse over critical race theory, history teacher Matt Bockenfeld raised concerns about what the bill would require of teachers. He gave what he thought was an extreme example.

“For example, it’s the second semester of U.S. history, so we're learning about the rise of fascism and the rise of Nazism right now,” Bockenfeld said. “And I'm just not neutral on the political ideology of fascism. We condemn it, and we condemn it in full, and I tell my students the purpose, in a democracy, of understanding the traits of fascism is so that we can recognize it and we can combat it.”

Here's the fascist assault in writing.

In a move that is both totally contrary to pedagogical methods and insults the intelligence of Hoosier students, HB 1040 would inscribe anti-communism in the curriculum of every school. State law already directs schools to provide five full class periods in the two weeks leading up to any general election to cover “(1) the system of government in Indiana and in the United States; (2) methods of voting; (3) party structures; (4) election laws; and (5) the responsibilities of citizen participation in government and in elections.” HB 1040 amends the law to clarify that

students must receive instruction that socialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism, or similar political systems are incompatible with and in conflict with the principles of freedom upon which the United States was founded. In addition, students must be instructed that if any of these political systems were to replace the current form of government, the government of the United States would be overthrown and existing freedoms under the Constitution of the United States would no longer exist. As such, socialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism, or similar political systems are detrimental to the people of the United States.

No mention of fascism, Nazism, or any other clearly right-wing "ism." Nope, no blatant partisan attacks or indoctrination here.

[LFC]

Remember the Republican charges of reeducation camps? Looks like they're hellbent on proving "every accusation is a confession."

The Republican Party is aggressively trying to take over America's schools and are not receiving an adequate response from Democrats, according to a new analysis in The Washington Post.

The newspaper published Paul Waldman's analysis under the headline, "Republicans are waging a war on schools. When will Democrats fight back?"

"Republicans have moved from hyping the boogeyman of critical race theory to taking practical steps to criminalize honest classroom discussions and ban books, turning their manufactured race and sex panic into profound political and educational change. Meanwhile, Democrats have done almost nothing about it, watching it all with a kind of paralyzed confusion," Waldman wrote.

He explained how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis introduced a "Stop Woke Act" and defended it on Fox News as being able to go after "other inappropriate content" beyond critical race theory.

"If you liked the Texas bill that effectively banned abortion in the state, you’re in luck. Republicans apparently want to use a version of that bill’s tactic — putting enforcement in the hands of private vigilantes — to make teachers and school administrators live under the same fear as abortion providers," he wrote. "Everywhere you look, Republicans are trying to outdo one another with state laws forcing teachers to parrot far-right propaganda to students."

Waldman noted that instead of trying to refute Republicans manafactured outrage, Democrats could go on the offensive.

"Republicans want to subject our kids to fascist indoctrination. Why do they want to teach our kids that slavery wasn’t bad? Why are they trying to ban books? Who’s writing their education policy, David Duke? Don’t let them destroy your schools!" he offered as an example.

Waldman said that would be an "unfair exaggeration of what most Republicans actually want," but wondered if there might be a better way than refutation.

[LFC]

Florida may force teachers to be monitored every moment they are in the classroom. Welcome to Republican fascism where forcing teachers to work in a COVID infested class and allowing every parent to monitor every word at all times is what they call "FREEDUMB!"

Republican state legislators in Florida are mulling passing a bill that would force teachers to wear microphones in class so that parents could monitor the lessons they're teaching students.

CBS News reports that the legislation is being pitched by Florida State Rep. Bob Rommel, who says that he believes that teachers can be monitored constantly without any infringements on privacy.

"I think if we can do it in a safe way to protect the privacy of students and teachers, I think we should do it," Rommel said. "I haven't heard a response good or bad from any teachers, but … it's not their private space. It's our children's space, too."

But Broward Teachers Union President Anna Fusco tells CBS that she's worried that people will be discouraged from entering the teaching profession if parents can monitor them at all times and criticize the lessons they're giving.

"You want to play Big Brother every moment?" she asked. "That's not how society should be. We need to get back to where we have trust, we have value, we have faith and we have conversations and we can work things out if something happens."

I'd love to see them put it through just to see the "the giant sucking sound" as teachers walk off the job. Of course that may be what DeSatanist and the Republicans want. Then you can have children "taught" by those who will follow God(tm)'s Will.

[Bact PhD]

Jan 14, 2022 20:42:12 GMT LFC said:

Florida may force teachers to be monitored every moment they are in the classroom. Welcome to Republican fascism where forcing teachers to work in a COVID infested class and allowing every parent to monitor every word at all times is what they call "FREEDUMB!"

Republican state legislators in Florida are mulling passing a bill that would force teachers to wear microphones in class so that parents could monitor the lessons they're teaching students.

CBS News reports that the legislation is being pitched by Florida State Rep. Bob Rommel, who says that he believes that teachers can be monitored constantly without any infringements on privacy.

"I think if we can do it in a safe way to protect the privacy of students and teachers, I think we should do it," Rommel said. "I haven't heard a response good or bad from any teachers, but … it's not their private space. It's our children's space, too."

But Broward Teachers Union President Anna Fusco tells CBS that she's worried that people will be discouraged from entering the teaching profession if parents can monitor them at all times and criticize the lessons they're giving.

"You want to play Big Brother every moment?" she asked. "That's not how society should be. We need to get back to where we have trust, we have value, we have faith and we have conversations and we can work things out if something happens."

I'd love to see them put it through just to see the "the giant sucking sound" as teachers walk off the job. Of course that may be what DeSatanist and the Republicans want. Then you can have children "taught" by those who will follow God(tm)'s Will.

(bold mine) It's been no secret here for the better part of the last two decades (beginning with Jeb!) that the endgame is to dismantle public education as it's been known for roughly the last 120 years. What with the emphasis on high-stakes testing, and school grades, and Tallahassee takeovers if a school doesn't "measure up," and most importantly, VOUCHERS to be used at private/religious (mostly the latter) schools... Flori-DUH has been at the forefront!

[pnwguy]

Jan 14, 2022 22:23:05 GMT Bact PhD said:

(bold mine) It's been no secret here for the better part of the last two decades (beginning with Jeb!) that the endgame is to dismantle public education as it's been known for roughly the last 120 years. What with the emphasis on high-stakes testing, and school grades, and Tallahassee takeovers if a school doesn't "measure up," and most importantly, VOUCHERS to be used at private/religious (mostly the latter) schools... Flori-DUH has been at the forefront!

Them kids only need enough education to read the bible. Anything more than that is Satanic indoctrination!

[LFC]

Alternative facts rule the RNC.

National Republican Committee (NRC) chair Ronna McDaniel, who’s moving toward banning GOP candidates from participating in debates sponsored by the Committee on Presidential Debates (CPD), apparently forgot a key detail behind one of her grievances against the CPD.

During an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday night, McDaniel listed various complaints about the CPD’s 2020 election debates between President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden, which the RNC official claimed were biased toward the Democrat.

“And then they switched one of the debates to virtual to let Joe Biden stay in the basement,” McDaniel said.

Except that’s not why the commission did that.

The CPD changed the second presidential debate to a virtual format due to Trump coming down with COVID-19 “in order to protect the health and safety of all involved,” including 77-year-old Biden.

The then-president, who was still infected at the time, kicked up a fuss over the format change and refused to participate, leading the CPD to cancel the event entirely.

Lies, lies, and more lies.

[LFC]

Virginia governor and Trump-mold fascist in a slicker package Glen Youngkin went full blown MAGAt right out of the gate. This included a tip line to report teachers who offended the MAGAt snowflakes. The anti-MAGAt trolls took it from there.

He should’ve known.

As we know, Virginia’s new Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin is working furiously to make good on his campaign promise to essentially make combatting Republican grievances, real and imagined, the top priority of the Virginia state government. We wrote recently about his reversal of the state’s universal masking policy for schools. He also moved to ban the teaching of “inherently divisive concepts” (read: “Critical Race Theory”) in public schools on Day One.

During an interview with conservative radio host John Fredericks earlier this week, Youngkin announced a new tip line his administration had set up, asking parents to notify the state government with reports of public teachers “behaving objectionably,” aka talking about race and systemic racism in the classroom, concepts that the GOP continues to squeeze beneath the ill-suited label “Critical Race Theory” — an academic framework that’s ruffled the right into hysterics in recent months.

“We’re asking for folks to send us reports and observations that they have that will help us be aware of things like privilege bingo, be aware of their child being denied their rights that parents have in Virginia. And we’re going to make sure we catalog it all,” he said Monday. “This gives us a great insight into what’s happening at a school level, and that gives us further ability to make sure we’re rooting it out.”

A bunch of red states have passed similar laws in the last year, seizing on baseless beliefs that teaching about racism in America is somehow harmful to (white) students. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is taking the whole charade several steps further by backing legislation that would outlaw workplace trainings or conversations that could make (white) employees feel “discomfort.”

Anyways, Youngkin’s tip line move was predictable. But so has been the backlash.

Isn't this the very thing that Rod Dreher fears so much? Turns out the Wiemar Republicans don't merit even a blog post from him.

[LFC]

Book banning. How right-wing America.

Amid the GOP's national campaign to purge "leftist ideology" from public schools, local officials across the nation are now banning certain books that deal with race, sex, and gender, from school shelves.

On Thursday, a Missouri school board voted 4-3 to formally pull Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" from high school libraries in the district. The book, which tells the story of a young Black girl growing up in the Great Depression, includes passages that describe incest and child molestation. Central to the book's premise is the narrator's struggle with society's white standards of beauty, which cause her to develop an inferiority complex around the color of her skin.

Wentzville School Board member Sandy Garber told the St. Louis Post Dispatch that she voted against the book to shield her children from obscenity. "By all means, go buy the book for your child," Garber said. "I would not want this book in the school for anyone else to see."

The decision comes despite pushback from district staff and residents, who after a committee review advised the board that banning the novel would "infringe on the rights of parents and students to decide for themselves if they want to read this work of literature."

Kris Kleindienst, owner of Left Bank Books in St. Louis, told a Fox affiliate that the board's vote sweeps important discussions of race and sexual abuse under the rug.

"Kids are growing and developing and should have access to as much material as is out there," Kleindienst said. "It shouldn't be the decision of a few parents what kids should read."

The book banning fever has reached a pitch in Mississippi this week as well.

Book bans are now part and parcel of the right-wing outrage machine.

[LFC]

Book bans and school subject bans continue to skyrocket in popularity among fascist Republicans. Even New Hampshire, which is generally not known to be as fringe as many other states, has decided to get in on the act. The "loyalty" part of this is pure Wiemar Republican.

Over the summer, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) signed a GOP-backed bill into law that mirrors many anti-Critical Race Theory bills that have passed in the last year or are still being considered in Republican states around the U.S. The text of the law, House Bill 2, the “Right to Freedom from Discrimination in Public Workplaces and Education,” is mild in comparison to other red states’ attempts at silencing discussions of issues like systemic racism and modern racial tensions in public schools.

The New Hampshire law “prohibits the dissemination of certain divisive concepts related to sex and race in state contracts, grants, and training programs.” It describes “divisive concepts” as a number of different things, including ideas like the United States being “fundamentally racist or sexist” or rhetoric that suggests “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

It’s not good on its face. But if you recall — I wrote about this development back in November — the new law came with another one of those problematic (and troll-vulnerable) tip-lines for parents to report to the state government instances in which they think teachers were breaking the law. A conservative moms group in the state seized on the new operation in November, offering a $500 bounty to the first person to lodge a successful complaint against an educator. We’ve seen this before. We live in the Wild West, etc.

But as teacher union groups sue over the law and Democratic lawmakers in the state legislature attempt to weaken the law with new bill proposals this session, Republicans in the state are digging their heels in, hell bent on making the current law even more dystopian than it already is.

Case in point: Republicans recently introduced a proposed bill, HB 1255, which is titled “An Act Relative to Teachers’ Loyalty.” It’s really disturbing.

HEIL TRUMPY!

[goldenvalley]

Feb 1, 2022 17:26:54 GMT LFC said:

Book bans and school subject bans continue to skyrocket in popularity among fascist Republicans. Even New Hampshire, which is generally not known to be as fringe as many other states, has decided to get in on the act. The "loyalty" part of this is pure Wiemar Republican.

Over the summer, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) signed a GOP-backed bill into law that mirrors many anti-Critical Race Theory bills that have passed in the last year or are still being considered in Republican states around the U.S. The text of the law, House Bill 2, the “Right to Freedom from Discrimination in Public Workplaces and Education,” is mild in comparison to other red states’ attempts at silencing discussions of issues like systemic racism and modern racial tensions in public schools.

The New Hampshire law “prohibits the dissemination of certain divisive concepts related to sex and race in state contracts, grants, and training programs.” It describes “divisive concepts” as a number of different things, including ideas like the United States being “fundamentally racist or sexist” or rhetoric that suggests “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

It’s not good on its face. But if you recall — I wrote about this development back in November — the new law came with another one of those problematic (and troll-vulnerable) tip-lines for parents to report to the state government instances in which they think teachers were breaking the law. A conservative moms group in the state seized on the new operation in November, offering a $500 bounty to the first person to lodge a successful complaint against an educator. We’ve seen this before. We live in the Wild West, etc.

But as teacher union groups sue over the law and Democratic lawmakers in the state legislature attempt to weaken the law with new bill proposals this session, Republicans in the state are digging their heels in, hell bent on making the current law even more dystopian than it already is.

Case in point: Republicans recently introduced a proposed bill, HB 1255, which is titled “An Act Relative to Teachers’ Loyalty.” It’s really disturbing.

HEIL TRUMPY!

As BactPhd points out...the destruction of public education is the goal. 

I have complaints about public education and education as a whole when it comes to K-12. I think mostly it is designed to produce good factory workers and considering that we are not a manufacturing economy anymore and that manufacturing is fundamentally different from the past it needs to be changed.  But destroying the system is not going to produce the results we need as a society.

[pnwguy]

Feb 1, 2022 20:19:45 GMT goldenvalley said:

I have complaints about public education and education as a whole when it comes to K-12. I think mostly it is designed to produce good factory workers and considering that we are not a manufacturing economy anymore and that manufacturing is fundamentally different from the past it needs to be changed.  But destroying the system is not going to produce the results we need as a society.

Silly rabbit.  Educated societies are for democracies.  The GOP elites wants the feudal system for the masses, at least until they can replace most occupations with robotics. Then "The Thinning" can begin, to reduce the pressure on planetary resources.