#michelle goldberg

[2bpoliticallycurious]

This is truly frightening. If DeSantis gets away with this, it will spread from Florida to other red states. And if DeSantis (or another Republican gets to the White House in 2024) he will undoubtedly attempt to impose his educational vision on all US universities that take any federal funding (i.e., all of them). Unfortunately, at this point, I have little faith in the conservative Supreme Court to declare this sort of bill unconstitutional.

House Bill 999 bars Florida’s public colleges and universities from offering gender studies majors or minors, as well as majors or minors in critical race theory or “intersectionality,” or in any subject that “engenders beliefs” in those concepts. The bill prohibits the promotion or support of any campus activities that “espouse diversity, equity and inclusion or critical race theory rhetoric.” This goes far beyond simply ending D.E.I. programming, and could make many campus speakers, as well as student organizations like Black student unions, verboten.

There’s more. Under House Bill 999, general education core courses couldn’t present a view of American history “contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence,” creating obvious limits on the teaching of subjects like slavery and the Native American genocide. The bill also says that general education courses shouldn’t be based on “unproven, theoretical or exploratory content,” without defining what that means. “State officials would have unfettered discretion to determine which views are ‘theoretical’ and banned from general education courses,” says a statement by the libertarian-leaning Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Finally, the bill centralizes political control over hiring by allowing faculty to be cut out of the process. Right now, some boards of trustees have the power to veto hiring recommendations made by faculty and administrators, though Young says they rarely use it. Under House Bill 999, rather than an up-or-down vote on candidates vetted by university bodies, trustees could just hire whomever they want. “They don’t even have to hire someone who applied through the regular process,” said Young. “They can just say, ‘Here’s my friend Joe, he’s going to be the new history professor.’”

This is pure neofascism. 

If the far right controls what young people learn, they can control the country.

The article above is a gift link, so even if you do not subscribe to The New York Times, you can read the entire article. I encourage you to do so.

#ron desantis #florida #higher education #academic freedom #sexism #racism #homophobia #transphobia #censorship #michelle goldberg #the new york times #house bill 999

[contemplatingoutlander]

The above is a gift link 🎁 for this excellent report/commentary by Michelle Goldberg about what is happening at the New College of Florida under Ron DeSantis. If you click on the link, you can read the entire article, even if you do not subscribe to The New York Times.

DeSantis has replaced the president of the college and the board of governors with right-wing partisans (including the far right culture warrior Chris Rufo), who want to remake this small, highly-ranked, public liberal arts college into a copy of the private, Christian, conservative Hillsdale College. 

Given the above, one of my primary questions is how can a state college be allowed to be turned into a “Christian” college? 

It’s like DeSantis thinks it is fine to just completely ignore the First Amendment’s Establishment clause, not to mention ignoring the First Amendment’s free speech protections (by attempting to limit what can be discussed/ taught at public colleges and universities).

Below are some excerpts from the article:

When I spoke to [Chris] Rufo in early January, he said that New College would look very different in the following 120 days. Nearly four months later, that hasn’t entirely come to pass, but it’s clear where things are headed.

The new trustees fired the school’s president, replacing her with Richard Corcoran, the Republican former speaker of the Florida House. They fired its chief diversity officer and dismantled the diversity, equity and inclusion office. As I was writing this on Friday, several people sent me photographs of gender-neutral signage scraped off school bathrooms. [...] Whatever New College’s administration does, this will likely be the last year classes like the ones [student Sam] Sharf is taking are offered, because a bill making its way through the Florida Legislature requires the review of curriculums “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.” The sense of dread on campus, however, goes beyond what’s happening in Tallahassee.

Eliana Salzhauer, whose 17-year-old son is a New College economics student, compared the seemingly inexorable transformation of the school to Twitter under Elon Musk: It looked the same at first, even as it gradually degraded into a completely different experience. “They are turning a top-rated academic institution into a third-rate athletic facility,” she said.

Salzhauer was referring, in part, to the hiring of Mariano Jimenez, who previously worked at Speir’s Inspiration Academy, as athletic director and head baseball coach, even though there’s no baseball diamond on campus. In the past, New College hasn’t had traditional sports teams, but the administration is now recruiting student athletes, and Corcoran has said he wants to establish fraternities and sororities, likely creating a culture clash with New College’s artsy queer kids, activists and autodidacts. Before Wednesday’s board meeting, about 75 people held a protest outside. “We’re Nerds & Geeks, not Jocks & Greeks,” said one sign.

[See more under the cut.]

For many, the board of trustees meeting was the clearest sign yet that this is the last semester of New College as they know it. The pivot point was the trustees’ decision to override the typical tenure process. New College hired a large number of new faculty five years ago, and this year was the first that any of them could apply for tenure. [...] Corcoran, however, had asked all the professors up for tenure this year to withdraw their applications because of the tumult at the school. Two of the seven agreed. The rest — three of them professors in the hard sciences — held out for the board’s vote. This was widely seen as a referendum not just on the individual candidates, but on faculty independence.

Fifty-four people registered to speak at the meeting. All but one of them either implored the trustees to grant the professors tenure or lambasted them for their designs on the school. Parents were particularly impassioned; many of them had been profoundly relieved to find an affordable school where their eccentric kids could thrive. Some tried to speak the language of conservatism: “You’re violating my parental rights regarding our school choice,” said Pam Pare, the mother of a biology major. One student, a second-year wrapped in a pink and blue trans flag, was escorted out of the meeting after cursing at Corcoran, but most tried to earnestly and calmly convey how much the professors up for tenure had taught them.

It was all futile. A majority of the trustees voted down each of the candidates in turn as the crowd chanted, “Shame on you!” That’s when [faculty chair Matthew] Lepinski quit, walking out of the room to cheers. [...] “Some faculty members have started to leave already, and obviously some students are thinking about what their future looks like,” Lepinski said right after quitting. A few days later, we spoke again. “There’s a grieving process for the New College that was, which is passing away,” he said. “I really loved the New College that was, but I am at peace that it’s gone now.”

Rufo couldn’t attend Wednesday’s meeting in person, because he’d been delayed coming home from Hungary, where he had a fellowship at a right-wing think tank closely tied to Viktor Orban’s government. (This seemed fitting, since Orban’s Hungary created the template for Rufo and Desantis’s educational crusade.) Instead, he Zoomed in, his face projected on a movie screen behind the other trustees.

After Lepinski quit, Rufo tweeted that “any faculty that prefer the old system of unfettered left-wing activism and a rubber-stamp board are free to self-select out.” Turnover, he added, “is to be expected — even welcomed. But we are making rapid, significant progress.” He and his allies haven’t built anything new at New College yet. They are succeeding, however, in tearing something down.

It makes sense that Chris Rufo, the activist who spearheaded the right-wing anti-CRT crusade, has recently been taking notes on how to create a very conservative college based on a “template” from the neofascist Viktor Orban’s Hungary.

I hope that lawsuits will be filed against DeSantis and the New College president and board of governors for their assault on First Amendment freedom of speech protections and the Establishment clause by Florida’s attempts to turn New College into a state funded conservative “Christian” liberal arts college.

#new college of florida #ron desantis #christopher rufo #gop takeover of higher education #separation of church and state #academic freedom #freedom of speech #michelle goldberg #the new york times #gift link

[gwydionmisha]

#Donald Trump #The Ku Klux Klan Act #Alabama #Charles Coleman #Michelle Goldberg #Election 2024 #News

[quotesfrommyreading]

Tom Stoppard’s wrenching drama “Leopoldstadt,” which I recently saw on Broadway, begins in 1899 at a Christmas party in the Vienna apartment of Hermann Merz, a prosperous and assimilated Jewish businessman, who is married to a Catholic and nominally converted. Hermann is convinced that the antisemitism that plagued his forefathers is fading into the past.

There’s still plenty of anti-Jewish prejudice around, he acknowledges, but nothing comparable to what prior generations endured. His family socializes with aristocrats, patronizes the arts, worships high culture. “This is the promised land, and not because it’s some place on a map where my ancestors came from,” he says to his anxious and pessimistic brother-in-law. “We’re Austrians now.”

The rest of the play, which ends in 1955, chronicles how misplaced this confidence was. Seen in 2022 in New York — my own promised land — it felt like both an elegy and a warning. Jews are thriving in America, and even with the violent resurgence of antisemitism in the Trump era, I’ve rarely felt personally threatened, perhaps a function of my privilege. Over the last week, though, I’m reminded that well-off Jews in other times and places have also imagined that they’d moved beyond existential danger, and been wrong.

  —  Antisemitism’s March Into the Mainstream

#michelle goldberg #antisemitism's march into the mainstream #current events #history #antisemitism #theatre #drama #judaism #holocaust #austria #usa #tom stoppard #leopoldstadt

[warningsine]

Satrapi: "[T]he world is very fearful, because we don't know who the enemy is. The world is at war, but at war against who? Bin Laden turns into Saddam and Saddam turns into someone else. They all the time talk about security. Security, security, security. But when you talk about security, then everything is about being safe. And being safe also means having less freedom.

"It makes a society much more conservative, looking for security. If you have freedom, then you have more risks. It goes together…My grandmother always said the saddest life is to be born a cow and to die a donkey. That means you are born stupid, and you're going to die even more stupid…What is the interest of life if you're always scared…? What is the point in living? Just eating and shitting and making money?"

Goldberg: Some conservatives here think that secular young Iranians would be happy if America would come and liberate them. What would you say to them?

Satrapi: "Democracy, contrary to what they try to tell us, it's not a paper that you hang on the wall and then you have a democracy…

"...They [America] talk about the human rights in Iran…[H]ow is it that the United States makes the biggest deals with China, and China is far from respecting human rights? What about Saudi Arabia? If you want to talk about an inquisition, the Iranian regime is far from being an inquisition. We have almost a free press, people leave, women have the right to study, they drive, they work. Saudi Arabia, they don't have anything like that! Talk about human rights in Saudi Arabia! Why doesn't anyone go and put a bomb in Saudi Arabia and kill the king?

"…[W]hen the Iranians wanted to become democratic in 1953 with [Mohammad] Mosaddeq and to nationalize our oil, the CIA came and made a coup d'état in my country. Why do you want me to believe that they want to come and make a democracy? We have to make our democracy!

"…For the people who think that America will come and liberate them, I invite them to read the history and see what America has done. I'm not talking about American people...I love going to the United States...I've been for several book tours; I've come for vacation with my husband. For me it's an amazing country. I love the enthusiasm of Americans…I love the pop art, I love the American cinema, there are so many things that I love about America! I love Coca-Cola, you know?

"My criticism is not towards America -- it's towards the American government, which to me are two different things. The America that I know is not represented by George W. Bush."

Goldberg: Do you see similarities between the Christian fundamentalists in our government and the mullahs in Iran? Satrapi: "They're the same! George Bush and the mullahs of Iran, they use the same words! The mullahs of Iran say we have God on our side; he has God on his side, too. Both of them are convinced that they are going to eradicate evil in the world. But when these words come out of the mouth of a mullah, it's normal. It's a shame that the president of the biggest secular democracy in the world talks with the same words as the mullahs. It's extremely scary."

#marjane satrapi #michelle goldberg

[porterdavis]

Abortion bans: the sequel

The vagueness in these laws is an expression of contempt. The people who wrote them either don’t know enough about how reproduction interacts with other health conditions to think through what they’re prohibiting, or they don’t care. 

In the coming weeks and months, a lot of Americans who don’t think anti-abortion laws apply to them are likely to be shocked at how their health care is curtailed, often at the most vulnerable moments of their lives.

,,,

So until Democrats win enough Senate seats to finally get rid of the filibuster, Congress is unlikely to do anything to stave off the coming catastrophe. Plan A is for Democrats to win in November. As far as I can tell there is no plan B.

- Michelle Goldberg, NY Times

#abortion bans #roe v wade #michelle goldberg

[books-in-media]

Amber Heard, (N/A, N/A)

—Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, Michelle Goldberg (2006)

#amber heard #kingdom coming #Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism #Michelle Goldberg #books #celebrities

[degenezijde]

Re: reproductive rights in America

I once picked up this book at random and found it really enlightening. It's from 2009 but still very relevant:

The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, by Michelle Goldberg

It's quite a heavy read, what with its subject, but it goes into the worldwide repercussions of the USA's stand on abortion. It also shows how paralysing the constant rope-pulling contest over reproductive rights in the US is for the country as a whole. I don't remember it being trans-inclusive, but it might still be valuable in the current fight.

#Books #Michelle goldberg #Reproductive rights #Current events #roe vs. wade #If you know me irl I have the book so

[dumbestthingiveeverheard]

Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard: 8/1/2023

Fifth Place: Asa Hutchinson

Despite being the only Republican running for President who I have any respect for, people need to face a rather important fact: Asa Hutchinson is not going to be President. Since the start of the 2024 race, it has been obvious that if Donald Trump entered he was going to be the nomination--and Trump has entered. This was demonstrated perfectly when Hutchinson was on CNN last night and we saw this graphic:

He couldn't even break half of one percent in any of the eight groups listed--seriously think about that.

Fourth Place: Laura Ingraham

Can we just admit that Fox News is a neo-Nazi network at this point? For fuck sake, last night brought us yet another example of a host pushing the horribly racist Great Replacement theory, with Ingraham saying:

Now, this is what Democrats have always wanted though, isn't it? An open border that would help usher in a new America. And this is what we're getting: Millions upon millions of illegals who fanned out across America with their free cell phones and dubious intentions.

I don't even know what to say about this outside of--well, this is the same thing Fox has been doing for years, and it seems like barley anybody, including the people whose job it is to monitor the right for things like this, barley notice it anymore. Media Matters barley took notice and from the looks of it no other media watchdog even mentioned it, it takes something especially offensive--like Greg's recent comments on the Holocaust--to even cause people to notice that Fox is engaging in the same rhetoric that actual fascists do.

Third Place: Steve Benen

MSNBC is easily the best out of the three cable news networks, but even they sometimes fall into the trap of not framing the story correctly. For example, Steve Benen's article on the website ran the headline "Dems slam Justice Alito’s latest claim as ‘stunningly wrong.’" However, this headline should make it a point to note that it's not merely the Democrats "slamming" Alito for saying Congress has no authority to regulate the Supreme Court, but it is them pointing out that what he said was, in fact, incorrect. This would be like claiming a teacher "slammed" a student who incorrectly answered a question on a test--except the student was also one of the nine most powerful people in the country.

Second Place: Michelle Goldberg

Her column "The Radicalization of the Young Right" falls into the typical liberal trap of having nostalgia for the terrible conservatives of the past because maybe they weren't as bad as those on the right today. The article sees her giving the benefit of the doubt to Nate Hochman, the DeSantis campaign staffer who was fired for putting fascist symbols into campaign ads, by writing:

Though the video’s imagery is clearly fascist — the sonnenrad, or sunwheel, is flanked by two rows of marching soldiers — Hochman has said that he didn’t know what the symbol meant. Given that he is Jewish, I’m inclined to believe that rather than being a covert Nazi, Hochman is simply a callow young man immersed in a milieu in which fascist idioms are so commonplace they can be picked up inadvertently. 

And honestly, who here hasn't accidentally put a fascist symbol into a video? (Or made their crossword puzzle look like a fascist symbol on the first day of a Jewish holiday?)

As Hochman clearly recognized, these days, young reactionaries find their inspiration not in the adolescent superman fantasies of Ayn Rand but in the nihilistic Joker energy of 4chan.

And how exactly are those two things different? Ayn Rand wrote stories about how everything was bad in mainstream society and those on the sidelines need to take over and get rid of all of those who disagree, and that's the motto of the modern right-wing. Of course, Ayn Rand was never a source of inspiration for reactionaries, who were primarily conservative, because Rand was not one--William Buckley, the person behind the post-World War Two conservative movement, even hated Ayn Rand and pushed her out of his new right.

Winner: John O'Connor

It's not everyday you see somebody attempt to defend Richard Nixon, but O'Connor did just that in his Townhall column "How Watergate Journalism Sowed the Seeds of Today’s Toxic Division." Even ignoring the silliness of the claim that Bob Woodward, a registered Republican, would do something like take down a sitting Republican President, and that The Washington Post would use Watergate as nothing more than an attempt to take down Nixon but wouldn't release most of the information on it until after the 1972 Presidential Election (George McGovern changing running mates was covered far more than Watergate during 1972) is nonsensical, but O'Connor is here to tell us what really happened:

But what was so patently false about the Washington Post Watergate journalism?  From the first days of the burglary arrests of June 17, 1972, the Post knew facts strongly showing that this had not been a White House campaign operation but, rather, was a small part of a widespread, long-lasting CIA program of surveilling prostitutes and their Johns.  Inveigling seeming White House approval from lower aides, the CIA hoped to gain a get out-of-jail-free card if later exposed.

And the fact that the organization which did this was called the Committee to Re-Elect the President is--what, a really bad coincidence? For those curious, O'Connor shows no evidence for this claim--instead he just spends the rest of the column insulting Mark Felt and modern journalism.

John O'Connor, you've said the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

#asa hutchinson #laura ingraham #steve benen #michelle goldberg #john o'connor

[allthestarsaregone]

please stop telling me your bathroom experiences

#opinon #michelle goldberg #say less #bathroom experience #privacy #strangers from hell

[doylewesleywalls]

Too little too late, Goldberg.  You did your damage.  That you’ve grown up a little bit and can now write this essay doesn’t fix what you did wrong.  And Kirsten Gillibrand is trash.  

#due process #fairness #Michelle Goldberg #Kirsten Gillibrand

[tomorrowusa]

If you haven’t been watching the January 6th hearings, perhaps you should.

It’s a brilliantly conducted detective narrative.

[T]he hearings are having more of an impact than I expected. The decision by the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, to keep pro-Trump Republicans off the Jan. 6 committee has eliminated the back-and-forth bloviating that typically plagues congressional inquiries, allowing investigators to present their findings with the narrative cohesion of a good true-crime series. Trump, who understands television, appears to be aware of how bad the hearings are for him; The Washington Post reported that he’s watching all of them and is furious at McCarthy for not putting anyone on the dais to defend him.

While not a huge number of people, it could actually change the minds of a some discerning viewers.

Dustin Stockton helped organize the pro-Trump bus tour that culminated in the Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse in front of the White House. Politico once called him and his fiancée, Jennifer Lawrence, the “Bonnie and Clyde of MAGA world.” On Tuesday, after a hearing that included testimony by Rusty Bowers, the speaker of the Arizona House, and the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, Stockton tweeted, “This has been the most impactful of the January 6th Committee hearings. Embarrassed that I was fooled by the Fulton County ‘suitcases of ballots’ hoax.”

He was referring to the conspiracy theory, pushed by Trump and his allies, that election workers smuggled fraudulent ballots into the State Farm Arena in Atlanta and ran them through the voting machines multiple times. Tuesday, he said, was the first time he realized the tale was a complete fabrication.

[ ... ]

[A]s the Jan. 6 committee methodically lays out what was, for all its squalor and absurdity, a systematic plan to subvert the 2020 election, it will get marginally harder for Trump to present himself as a defrauded winner rather than the flailing loser he is.

Some of the evidence presented by the committee may end up being used in prosecutions.

Getting the truth out won’t guarantee justice. It’s at least a step toward making justice possible.

The hearings are also very good television. They are coherent and marvelously well presented. Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS-02) is a gem.

You won’t see self-serving blowhards like Ted “Cancún” Cruz using their appearances to create soundbites and memes for their next election campaign.

Check out the first hearing from June 13th. If you find it compelling, watch the other four hearings as well. It would be an appropriate way to mark the upcoming July 4th weekend.

#select committee to investigate the january 6th attack on the united states capitol #hearings #assault on the us capitol by pro-trump terrorists #donald trump #attempted coup #bennie thompson #michelle goldberg

[contemplatingoutlander]

Michelle Goldberg has written an essay that reflects what I have been thinking lately--that one of the major reasons the extreme right-wing Republicans believe that the Second Amendment gives them a right to bear semi-automatic weapons is because they believe they need to use those weapons against some of their fellow Americans who don’t want our country to become a right-wing, white, “Christian” theocracy. They have become the “party of insurrection,” creating and maintaining numerous “unregulated” extreme right-wing militias. 

Below are some excerpts from this excellent opinion column:

These days, it’s barely remarkable when Republicans issue what sound like threats against those who’d dare curtail their private arsenals. “I have news for the embarrassment that claims to be our president — try to take our guns and you’ll learn why the Second Amendment was written in the first place,” Randy Fine, a state representative in Florida, tweeted on Wednesday.

It will be impossible to do anything about guns in this country, at least at a national level, as long as Democrats depend on the cooperation of a party that holds in reserve the possibility of insurrection. The slaughter of children in Texas has done little to alter this dynamic. [...]

The horrifying irony, the hideous ratchet, is that the more America is besieged by senseless violence, the more the paramilitary wing of the American right is strengthened. Gun sales tend to rise after mass shootings. Republicans responded to the massacre in Uvalde by doubling down on calls to arm teachers and “harden” schools. An article in The Federalist argued that parents must home-school so that kids can learn “in a controlled environment where guns can be safely carried for self-defense or locked away when not in use.” It’s a vision of a society — if you can call it that — where every family is a fortress.

Guns are now the leading cause of death for American children. Many conservatives consider this a price worth paying for their version of freedom. Our institutions give these conservatives disproportionate power whether or not they win elections. The filibuster renders the Senate largely impotent. Trump, a president who lost the popular vote, was able to appoint Supreme Court justices who are poised to help overturn a New York state law restricting the carrying of concealed weapons. It’s increasingly hard to see a path to small-d democratic reform.

And so among liberals, there’s an overwhelming feeling of despair. Even as people learn the names of all those murdered children, the most common sentiment is not “never again,” but a bitter acknowledgment that nothing is going to change. America is too sick, too broken. It is perhaps beyond repair.

#gun culture #us politics #gop #republican insurrectionists #uvalde shooting #michelle goldberg #the new york times

[gwydionmisha]

CW: Rape.

#Michelle Goldberg #E. Jean Carroll #Rape #Donald Trump #News

[quotesfrommyreading]

That’s what Trump does: By violating the norms holding together liberal democratic society with impunity, he renders those norms inoperable.

  —  Antisemitism’s March Into the Mainstream

#michelle goldberg #antisemitism's march into the mainstream #current events #politics #american politics #antisemitism #racism #sociology #usa #donald trump

[arlengrossman]

America May Be Broken Beyond Repair

America May Be Broken Beyond Repair

By Michelle Goldberg/ /New York Times/ May 27, 2022 In an ad released last year, Blake Masters, a leading candidate in Arizona’s Republican Senate primary, cradles a semiautomatic weapon. “This is a short-barreled rifle,” he said, ominous music playing in the background. “It wasn’t designed for hunting. This is designed to kill people.” For Masters, this isn’t an argument against allowing such…

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#Blake Masters #David French #Michelle Goldberg #New York Times #Shasta County #Uvalde