Follow-Ups 4/20/24
Some updates and follow-ups on things addressed and referenced over the course of this here newsletter
Last things first, I guess
The City Commission in Lawrence Kansas has edited out the antisemitic diatribe from its YouTube feed I talked about in Two Nazis Walk Into a Public Forum.
My transcription of the hate-speech remains as accurate as I could make it, and I stand by my argument: that when you can't gatekeep and screen out people who will not abide by the rules of a community that tries to respect the humanity of all participants, you open a door to the worst dregs who destroy said community.
This is what gutting DEI requirements is about, no matter what gussied up bullshit Reps. Howe and Hawkins and Fairchild say otherwise. Their "arguments" are garbage on their face.
But, as John Hanna reports for AP, the Kansas Board of Regents has caved to those bad-faith actors, removing any requirements to inquire about DEI from university practice, under budgetary threat from Sen. J. R. Claeys, another POS from Salina, and an ally / clone / lickspittle of AG Kobach (who, under the terms of Howe's Sub HB 2460, would have been able to get his grubby hands on some of the investigations into DEI "orthodoxy pledges").
And Tim Carpenter at the Reflector delves deeper. Here are some particularly relevant bits:
[Kirk] Haskins, a Topeka Democrat and a professor at Baker University in Baldwin City, said he was offended a majority in the Kansas Legislature was so threatened by campus diversity initiatives that they voted to approve budget provisions slashing university funding unless Gov. Laura Kelly signed House Bill 2105 banning DEI in Kansas public higher education.
Offended? No, that's weak sauce, Kirk.
“How do we even tolerate the extortion of funds from our post-secondary institutions?” said Haskins, who argued proponents were intent on undermining decades of work to create college and university safe havens for minority students and faculty and to open campuses to diverse perspectives. “If you continue to restrict higher education, you will see one ideology, one race back into schools.”
Better, Kirk, better. Getting there, buddy. Feel the rage. Let it flow through you!
Rep. Bob Lewis, a Garden City Republican and an attorney, said DEI programs on college campuses should be viewed as vehicles for advancing liberal ideologies of “division, exclusion and intimidation” rather than promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion. Conservative legislators in Kansas and more than a dozen states have argued DEI should be rooted out because it discriminated against certain students and employees.
Certain students and employees. Which ones, Bob? Which ones? Can you profile them? Describe them?
Hint: They hate trans people and want them eliminated from the public square. Some of them bombed a Zoom forum at the Lawrence City Commission on April 16. They like the initials HH. They’re fond of a certain 14 words. They believe certain people aren't really people, or not fully people, and not deserving of the same basic respect and rights aas all other people. Just come out and say it, you fucking bigot.
(Not for nothing, but just look at that tool's picture at the Reflector and tell me he doesn't have an SS Uniform in his closet.)
Lewis compared establishment of university DEI programs to pressure campaigns in the 1950s that compelled Americans to sign anti-communist loyalty oaths.
But y'all liked Joe McCarthy and the hunt for commies under every rock! Here's Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation singing his praises!
Whoops, now he's walking it back when not on pro-life conservative hothouse media.
What fight was waged against the anti-DEI effort involved Rep. Brandon Woodard, who I noted (in Conspiracy, Iniquity and Exclusion, Part 2), spent part of his floor time alleging that a witness had lied to the Higher Education Budget Committee.
This accusation was not strategic as an attack on the anti-DEI bill, lacked any evidence at the time, and set up Rep. Steven Howe to ride in and defend the honor of the poor, defamed young woman and muddy the discussion with details that steered everything even further away from the real issues that should have been front and center of the debate.
To make matters worse, it seems Woodard was wrong in his accusations about the witness and had to issue an apology over the matter, which he did on Twitter.
File this under "Unforced Error / Dems Really Need to Coordinate Strategies / SMH."
As I wrote in Probst’s Problem, and Ours, our Dems can’t afford to screw up.
In Veni, Vidi, Veto, I argued that the "abortion survey" bill was utterly misleading and just another attempt to chip away at abortion rights since the big swing of a state constitutional amendment had turned out to be such a whiff.
On Twitter, dogged tracker of Christian Nationalists Jenny Cohn of the Bucks County Beacon posted YouTube video
of Heritage Foundation head Kevin Roberts admitting the anti-abortion messaging is pivoting to focus on "concern for the mother" to minimize electoral hemorrhaging in 2024. I don't think these are unrelated.
While Kansans overwhelmingly rejected the constitutional amendment to overturn bodily autonomy, this only made conservative legislators go back to nibbling away at it, whilst still refusing to give Kansas what they repeatedly say they want: Medicaid expansion and marijuana legalization.
Clay Wirestone has a very good piece in the Reflector on this exact point, "Arrogant Republican leaders think they know better than everyday Kansans," quoting in full the column of state GOP chairman Mike Brown where he bare-facedly lies about the rock-solid data showing what Kansans want on these issues. Give it a read, please (and give the Reflector money).
Speaking of Medicaid expansion, or non-expansion, Dale Hogg covered Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins' appearance at a Plainville event for the Rooks County Republicans, at the invitation of the Rooks County Conservative Alliance, where food was provided by Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity.
Because of course.
It's a good piece, and you should read it.
Transfolk and The Ideologies They Dare Not Describe
Trans news is implicated in the anti-DEI measure because, while Republicans won't explain that the nefarious "ideology" underlying DEI is supposed to entail, it can be pieced together by listening to what other fascists are all too happy to shout from their (seven) mountaintops.
For some, the scariest thing about DEI is that they will be "forced" to refer to someone with the "wrong" pronouns. Under penalty of…well, that's not exactly clear.
Social disapproval of some sort, and that's just plain intolerable to folks who believe they’re entitled to nothing but praise and adulation for even deigning to exist on the same planet with all these lower life forms and deviants. We all should be grateful they don't just gun us down in the streets like they secretly want to.
That's what they'd really like to say, but can't, because then their bills wouldn't pass. Or maybe the bills would pass, but everybody'd know what the end goals really are, and they don't quite have enough of a lock on things to fade that heat. Yet. Still some lingering remnants of democracy to stifle and dismantle.
Let's spell it out. Conservatives believe some combination of the following fever dream, thanks to the provocateurs they imbibe like shotgunned poison beers:
The woke libs are socialist, Cultural Marxists who, at the behest of Jews and other Globalists and snobby Elites and the Professional Managerial Class (who have taken over Capital), and who may be mainlining adrenochrome they harvest from the white children they traffic and molest in Pizza joint basements in order to remain eternally young, are trying to destroy and control America by undermining Good, Traditional American values and Natural Law and Biblical Truth. They do this by conquering culture and insinuating acceptance of degenerate practices like homosexuality, catkin, gender ideology, feminism, economic redistribution, and open borders to admit migrant hordes who don't share the values of Western Civilization but who will robotically vote Demonrat to soak up all the welfare state benefits and steal all the jobs. They also hate and kill babies. And want to take our freedoms. We need a strongman, wielding dictatorial powers to restore our freedoms by crushing the Bad People, like the undeserving minorities and all those sickos and deviants and groomers and budding terrorists and unbelievers.
Roxbury, Kansas, 6/3/09. Photo by me.
Since this is all confabulation and conspiracy, fact-checks of any one portion never stick. Facts are vulnerable to the semi-permeable membranes of cognitive frameworks of underlying moral beliefs, and when one of your moral beliefs is that liberals = demons, then any fact that works to humanize or de-escalate the hatred, will be excluded from consideration.
Fox News gets this dynamic, which is why they feed it. Fact-checkers do not get it, which is why they bang their heads against the wall of obstinate, patently insane conservative animus, imagining that just the right rational approach will maybe form a crack, maybe break through.
But the wall was built, like any great human working, over decades of painstaking brick-laying, layer upon layer, by AM Talk propagandists speaking directly into the ears of countless guys driving along in their trucks across the vast highways of America, then repeated back at them by other dudes who listened to the same things when they all met up at the diner later for coffee. So the fellas got the same message from on high and from their peers, and it all boinged around like ricocheting fire in an enclosed space until everybody caught at least one bullet. It's the conventional wisdom now in community after community, in space after space, and if you aren't down with it, you give off a vibe that they can recognize, and you can see that they recognize it.
At any rate, that, or some Mad-Libs version of it, is The Ideology or Movement people like Steven Howe, J. R. Claeys, Brett Fairchild, Dan Hawkins, and Bob Lewis are referring to when they say they don’t want anyone to have to “pledge” to support DEI. They just won’t come out and say it. They’ll choose vaguaries instead.
If they put it the way I did above, they sound like their base, and that’s too batshit. If they spell out the more intellectual version of it, they sound like straight-up Nazis, and that’s too fascist. That’s admitting that their base is full of loons who they think are entitled to admission to universities despite hateful and deranged worldviews of supremacy that clash with the very American ideal of “all of us are created equal and have equal rights to be respected in this place, despite your retrograde and deluded programming.”
Since Trump dropped any shame in saying the quiet parts as loud as he could, since every right-wing influencer joined that screaming, cacophonous chorus, conservatives want to have the right to say any ignorant, hateful, disruptive thing in an educational setting they want, without consequences to themselves. (Recall that the traditional restriction on speech in educational settings was based on the speech’s disruption to the educational mission or purpose. Recall also that universities used to have the freedom to craft their admissions with a diversity focus so long as they didn’t use race as a quota system or primary factor. Then we got Trump’s SCOTUS….)
This is all a bid to replace the alleged conservative value of personal responsibility with bigoted immunity, just like the Orange One has enjoyed so far, and because Republicans have such a political advantage, they’re getting their way.
If you think the anti-Dei stuff is just about students and colleges, you’re wrong. It’s about what kind of state we want to live in, whether ignorant assholes should have free reign to wander all over and be dicks with fewer and fewer checks on their behavior.
If you think the anti-trans stuff is just about transfolk, you’re wrong. It’s just as much about bodily autonomy as the abortion amendment. It’s about your rights to parent as you choose and seek the medical care you choose. It’s about LGB rights as much as T. Insert the Niemoller poem here, because you can’t sit back and sacrifice anybody to demons and imagine you’ll ever be safe, from the demons or from the guilty conscience.
Lastly, in The F-Word and the C-Word, I footnoted that…
Looking forward to White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, By Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. Apparently their argument is, in part, that if red state voters won’t elect Democrats who push policies that would benefit them, they can at least start electing better Republicans. Hope this isn’t just warmed-over What’s the Matter With Kansas? analysis.
Not wanting to steer folks wrong, I have to report that “the discourse” on this book has turned a bit. It may just be the predictable backlash by the center-right, but there have been a few pieces and Twitter threads from people who don’t suck taking issue with the book on grounds that raise concern. One has to do with methodology in that a lot of what the authors claim is “rural” is in fact suburban at least according to strict definitions.
I’m unsure if that difference makes a difference, so I’ll probably end up reading it. But my urgency and enthusiasm is a little attenuated, and I thought I’d offer the caution.