Miscellaneous Political Stuff - Part 14

Heather Cox Richardson’s post was really important today.

heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-26-2023

In the middle of an apocalyptic fire season in Canada, water temperatures off the coast of Florida as hot as 100 degrees, killing coral reefs and the Gulf Stream in near danger of ending, Mike Pence is proposing to eliminate the EPA. That seems on brand for the Republicans these days



www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/opinion/climate-canada-wildfires-emissions.html

In Quebec, more land was torched in June than in the previous 20 years combined, with a single out-of-control complex there growing to 2.5 million acres — in a section of the province where, in recent years, the average total has been a tenth of that. Across Canada, the total was more than 25 million acres, or about two and a half times as much land as burned in any of the worst American seasons of the past 50 years, with most of Canada’s fire season still ahead, putting the country on track to produce more carbon emissions from the burning of boreal forest than all of its other human and industrial activities combined.

Maybe he should go with his  'fight'  to California?? 😊

The cognitive dissonance of some people is astounding. Drive thru pretty much anywhere in Warren county NJ and you’ll see tons of signs ‘no warehouses’ they are very anti warehouse, not sure I blame them. I get it. But theses are the same properties that had Trump Pence signs out for 2020 and they are they same people who will cheer to eliminate the EPA.

Who the hell do they think prevents giant warehouse projects from happening? I mean really, you think the planning board or zoning board of your tiny NJ township has the money & resources to stand up to the deep pockets and lawyers of Amazon and Wayfaire? No, no, they don’t, those big companies will just keep appealing the denials over & over until court & lawyer fees bankrupt your town. I’ve seen it happen. It is the EPA & the EPA regulations that give local municipalities a leg to stand on with issues like these. Once they can’t point to the list of EPA regulations that are in the way of what the large company wants to do the local municipalities don’t have anything backing them when they say no.

Amazon will steam roll over them without the federal regulations. But they just refuse to understand. I don’t get it.

When the storm water run off from the giant warehouses floods the roads they take to work because there weren’t any EPA regulations to require the corporation to manage the storm run off properly I hope they remember that they get what they vote for but I’m sure they won’t

Not included in that clip, Jesse Watters also said that's only 1 passage out of 190 passages that DO cover in depth, the evils and horrors of slavery.
Also not shown in that clip, him saying that they are teaching from the perspective of the slave instead of only from the perspective of the master.

That's a good thing, IMO. It teaches the students about their humanity.

One of the writers of the curriculum, Dr. Allen: "Any attempt to reduce slaves to JUST victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage and resilience during a difficult time in American history.
Students deserve to learn how slaves took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves and the community of African descendants."

1 sentence is being taken out of 190 passages that DO teach how evil slavery is, in order to claim they aren't teaching how evil slavery is. Being used to try to claim that they are defending slavery.

That one word "benefitted" is tripping everything up. So, maybe they should work to change that passage so that it better states that perspective of the slaves.

Another breach in the wall...

Gabriel Sterling, the Republican chief operating officer of the Georgia Secretary of State's office, made a fresh plea to Trump supporters in the wake of former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani's admission that he made false statements about Georgia poll workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.

Of course you're defending DeSantis and the idea that slaves learned trades.  It's entirely possible to show the humanity, strength and courage of slaves without defending the slave holders.  The objection to the Florida curriculum is about a lot more than one line.  The Florida curriculum also blames blacks for violence during Reconstruction and neglects to give them credit for their activism and demands for rights.  The new curriculum whitewashes over the horrors of Reconstruction among other things.


heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-22-2023


Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p. 154).

The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.

In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6) (This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.

This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people.

Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S. Black enslavement was not the same as indentured servitude except perhaps in the earliest years of the Chesapeake settlements when both were brutal—historians argue about this— and Indigenous enslavement was distinct from servitude from the very beginning of European contact. Some enslaved Americans did in fact work in the trades, but far more worked in the fields (and suggesting that enslavement was a sort of training program is, indeed, outrageous). And not just white abolitionists but also Black abolitionists and revolutionaries helped to end enslavement.

Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.

Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black and white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).

It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson's impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p. 104).

That’s quite a tall order.

But that’s not the end of Reconstruction in the curriculum. Another unit calls for students to “distinguish the freedoms guaranteed to African Americans and other groups with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution…. Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups…. Compare the effects of the Black Codes…on freed people, and analyze the sharecropping system and debt peonage as practiced in the United States…. Review the Native American experience” (pp. 116–117).

Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extended rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p. 109).

All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.”

The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage.

And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves.

There's a lot wrong with the new Florida standards, not just 1 line. There are a lot of historical inaccuracies.

www.nytimes.com/2023/07/21/us/desantis-florida-black-history-standards.html


The teaching of positive history is important, said Albert S. Broussard, a professor of African American studies at Texas A&M University who has helped write history textbooks for McGraw Hill. “Black history is not just one long story of tragedy and sadness and brutality,” he said.

But he saw some of Florida’s adjustments as going too far, de-emphasizing the violence and inhumanity endured by Black Americans and resulting in only a “partial history.”

“It’s the kind of sanitizing students are going to pick up,” he said. “Students are going to ask questions and they are going to demand answers.”

One contested standard states that high school students should learn about “violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” during race massacres of the early 20th century, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre. In that massacre, white rioters destroyed a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., and as many as 300 people were killed.

By saying that violence was perpetrated not just against but “by African Americans,” the standards seem to grasp at teaching “both sides” of history, said LaGarrett King, the director of the Center for K-12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education at the University at Buffalo.

But historically, he said, “it’s just not accurate.”

By and large, historians say, race massacres during the early 1900s were led by white groups, often to stop Black residents from voting.

That was the case in the Ocoee Massacre of 1920, in which a white crowd, incensed by a Black man’s attempt to vote, burned Black homes and churches to the ground and killed an unknown number of Black residents in a small Florida town.

I'm not defending DeSantis and that has nothing to do with it.

Dr. William Allen said, "What this curriculum is about, is having people who lived the experience, who lived the history, tell their stories. And nothing is more important than that we never, ever, erase the stories that the people who lived the stories tell. No one has a right to interpret before first understanding the stories as the people who lived them understood them, themselves.

Heather Cox Richardson has at great length, questioned it. Her questioning is as irrelevant as Kamala Harris' falsehood, even though she correctly cites the sentence that was called into question. Why? Because what is being done here is the attempt to create stories for our time and impose them on people who told their stories in their own time. Thereby erasing their stories."

It gets worse... Welcome to the DeSantis Trade Trade School ..


Of course he was involved!!  As he is in most of what is going on in Florida!!

GOP at its best.. Rep cursing out 16-17 year old Senate pages while they were waiting for a Senate session.

‘Jackasses,’ ‘little s‑‑‑‑’: GOP congressman curses out teenage Senate pages
BY AL WEAVER - 07/27/23 4:25 PM ET

Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) is in hot water after he cursed out a group of teenage Senate pages in the Capitol rotunda early Thursday morning.

According to a transcript written by a page minutes after the incident and obtained by The Hill, Van Orden called the pages “jackasses” and “pieces of s‑‑‑,” and told them he didn’t “give a f‑‑‑ who you are.”

The pages are a group of 16- and 17-year-olds who assist Senate operations, and when the Senate works late — as it did Wednesday night on National Defense Authorization Act amendments — pages generally rest nearby in the rotunda.

“Wake the f‑‑‑ up you little s‑‑‑‑. … What the f‑‑‑ are you all doing? Get the f‑‑‑ out of here. You are defiling the space you [pieces of s‑‑‑],” Van Orden said, according to the account provided by the page.

“Who the f‑‑‑ are you?” Van Orden asked, to which one person said they were Senate pages. “I don’t give a f‑‑‑ who you are, get out.”

“You jackasses, get out,” he added.

The incident, which occurred just after midnight, outraged members of the upper chamber, with one calling the string of remarks “horrible.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) later on Thursday took to the Senate floor to defend the pages.

“I understand that late last night, a member of the House majority thought it appropriate to curse at some of these young people — these teenagers — in the rotunda. I was shocked when I heard about it, and I am further shocked at his refusal to apologize to these young people,” he said.

“I can’t speak for the House of Representatives, but I do not think that one member’s disrespect is shared by this body, by [Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)] and myself.”

Van Orden did not dispute the exchange and defended his actions when asked by The Hill.

thehill.com/homenews/4123626-gop-congressman-curses-out-teenage-senate-pages/

Too bad the 2 men defending the curriculum got some of the facts wrong.  Maybe DeSantis' handpicked committee should not be writing a curriculum if they are writing something that is historically inaccurate.

www.tampabay.com/news/education/2023/07/21/benefited-slavery-critics-say-some-states-examples-were-never-even-slaves/

www.nytimes.com/2023/07/28/opinion/desantis-slavery-florida-curriculum-history.html

In a statement, two members of Florida’s African American history standards work group defended the language in question, citing 16 individuals who, they say, developed valuable skills while in bondage.

Unfortunately for the Florida Department of Education, several of the people cited weren’t ever enslaved, and there’s little evidence that those who were learned any relevant skills for their “personal benefit” in slavery.

The point of teaching fictions about slavery was both to inscribe racist ideologies into the nation’s identity and to justify the renewed subjugation of an entire class of Americans.

This is why the history of textbooks past is particularly relevant. The history we teach to students in the present is as much about the country we hope to be as it is a record of the country we once were. A curriculum that distorts the truth of past injustice is meant, ultimately, for a country that excludes in the present.