I was 196 words into the first draft of this post when I took a break and hung up my new Pride Flag.
Naturally, Facebook immediately threatened me with this:
Could I have asked for a better example of content- and context-neutral policing of speech to kick off this installment? Facebook or its robot cannot tell the difference between me calling someone a slur and me expressing disgust and rejection of those who call me a slur.
So both must be banned from the platform.
In related news:
Governor Laura Kelly will allow the anti-DEI bill to become law without her signature.
Here's the key quote from Rachel Mipro's story:
“While I have concerns about this legislation, I don’t believe that the conduct targeted in this legislation occurs in our universities,” Kelly said. “We need to move forward and focus our efforts on making college more affordable and providing students from all backgrounds with the tools they need to succeed. I am focused on advancing policies that drive economic growth and develop tomorrow’s workforce. For that reason, I will allow the bill to become law without my signature.”
Translation: "The GOP says we're doing bad stuff at our colleges, but we're not, so this is pointless, a law against conduct that's not occurring."
To recap, the "bad stuff" alleged is some kind of fever-dream, paranoid, anti-conservative "woke" orthodox regime of systematic discrimination either screening out corn-fed MAGA kids and professors, or forcing them (with thumbscrews, probably) to convert to wokeism and worship false gods like, um, RuPaul or somebody.
In that sense, Kelly's right, this "bad stuff" ain't occurring at our public colleges.
(Though I am open to a pilot program.)
I'm disappointed in Kelly's framing, of course. She seems to grant that the anti-DEI law is about discrimination and stifling free speech, which it isn't.
She doesn’t mention that, the way the law is written, bad-faith actors can weaponize the law without any cost to themselves to basically sue schools that deny them admission or a job on merit by claiming they were discriminated against for volunteering their so-very-edgy "conservative" principles like repealing the franchise for women or Brown v. Board or Bostock.
I argued this in Conspiracy, Iniquity and Exclusion, Part 2, and no doubt some will think I'm paranoid in that argument, but hell, we've seen the Supreme Court accept and buy phony conservative discrimination cases about web designers and football coaches, completely manufactured by the Alliance Defending Freedom, pretty much the go-to legal outfit if you want to oppress LGBTQIA+ people, so either read more, or shut up.
Kelly’s short justification for allowing the law to go into effect then pivots to "moving forward" to material costs of college, economic growth, and so on, which is valid and understandable, but this, too, is an argument for DEI, as Rep. Kirk Haskins noted exasperatedly in his floor speech in the Kansas house, but this is now water under the bridge.
And that's the rub, isn't it?
Hedville, Kansas area. 8/30/10. Photo by me.
By this stage in the process, Kelly has to pick and choose what battles to fight, where to spend her precious "political capital" in vetoes, how to marshal her forces, however they may lie, to try to stop the most immediate threats to Kansans, and she's choosing to fight voting restrictions and rollbacks to the right to choose.
These are good and vital fights, and I hope she wins, and trying to fight a rhetorical battle for hearts and minds on DEI at this over-and-done stage, more or less single-handedly against the entirety of the GOP, doesn't fit the calculus.
I get all that.
But we don't get to this point without a lot of stuff beforehand, and that's what chaps my hide.
Even if we were destined to lose on this law, we weren't destined to lose this badly. We weren't destined to allow DEI to be tarred as a bogey-word in Kansas, the reputations of our public universities smeared and associated with frankly deranged conspiracies, which—make no mistake, were fed and watered by all this—at the behest of a nationwide movement to do to DEI what provocateurs did to Critical Race Theory the other year
We could have given up the ground more grudgingly, made the conservative victory more pyrrhic, bloodied and shamed them more by (1) clearly seeing what they were trying to do much earlier, (2) calling that out in clear and strategically unified terms, and (3) hitting them smartly, without so many unforced errors and wasted opportunities.
At the very least, we could have given Kelly a chance to squeeze a few more jabs into her final statement and prevented her from having to accept the Right's bullshit framing of the law.
I hate to use the US Congress as an example, but it actually fits: look at how the Congressional Democrats on the bullshit committees to investigate Hunter Biden or the surreal United States House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have fought back and exposed the craven nonsense underlying what the GOP is up to with those efforts.
This example actually fits like a glove. The Hunter Biden and government weaponization nonsense is precisely the same sort of lunacy as the DEI-is-a-secret-blood-oath-of-fealty-to-woke-orthodoxy delusion behind this rotten law. There is no there there. The absence of anything but absurdity and manufactured crazy could have been exposed. The absolute pandering to the worst elements of the fever swamps could have been revealed.
But it wasn't.
Look, Kelly’s brand, her reputation, and pretty much the only way you get a Democratic governor in the state of Kansas is as a pragmatic, corrective moderate who fixes the disasters of conservative insanity. In order to give her ammo to fight, you have to do the work to show the people exactly how the anti-DEI bills were in fact conservative insanity, and that just plain was not done.
Opposition to the anti-DEI law was fatigued, defeatist, strategically scatter-brained, apparently uncoordinated, and weak-sauce. Do not come at me with the argument that there were greater and bigger threats because there always are. That’s part of the game plan: flood the zone with shit and make your opponents focus on the worst threats so the seemingly lesser ones slip through. The lesser ones will kill you, too, just slower. It all advances conservative agendas, which means, in the long term, more conservatives in office, more conservative power, more ass-whuppings down the line.
And don’t come at me with how few resources the Kansas Democrats have. I know they don't have much, but it also doesn't take much to do better. Simply a clear eye as to the end games involved goes a long, long way: what kinds of strategic moves the GOP hopes to achieve by further demonizing universities and advancing this "war on woke" bullshit. They don't just say it because the base likes it. It has resonating roots in the fascistic tendencies of their funders and their base. It fits with the overall goal of segmenting people into the Worthy and Unworthy, the Deserving and Undeserving, to legitimize ill-treatment to the disfavored and special treatment for the privileged.
I know everyone’s pressed for time and energy during the session. But how hard could it have been to offer to sit for a one-hour phone interview with a press outlet or two on the anti-DEI bill? Every Democrat willing to? Craft those messages beforehand, strategize with one another. Stagger them to keep the coverage alive. This could all have been plotted out in an evening, I kid you not.
Don't just talk to your hometown press, because legislation like this affects us all. Hawkins went clear out to Plainville to talk about Medicaid (and it still wasn't far enough to hide).
Ditto floor debates and committee opposition. Whatever a Democrat’s image in their home district, there was some wiggle-room to work with on this law.
We heard Rep. Kirk Haskins play up the pro-business angle of DEI in his floor speech. That avenue was available to anyone who tries to court the moderate image and avoid too much "lefty woke" stuff. You could say all that stuff is "certainly concerning" while you pivot to focus on the bottom line.
Divvy up the attacks. Just as Whack-a-doo Rep. Chuck Smith out of Pittsburg can wax demented on the war dead of three major conflicts in connection with this bill, somebody can get up there and wax poetic about their alma maters, and mash the buttons about our great state universities and how the DEI crackdown is slanderous and shameful for the legislature to even consider (another point Haskins tried to make, but the more points, the more diluted each one becomes).
Instead of Rep. Tom Sawyer asking "What's bad about DEI?" get a bunch of pugilistic sumbitches up there to press really damn hard to force the advocates to come out and say what's so bad about it. Make them admit the paranoid conspiracy crap. If they won't, start reading from prominent whack-jobs on the national scene who do describe what DEI is alleged to be, the crazier and the more prominent the better. If you can quote our state reps from their newsletters or fundraising pitches or private speeches, that's pure gold. Make these guys say on the record whether they "stand with or against" prominent so-and-so when he says this is what DEI means and that's why it has to be singled-out as a nefarious ideology. Make them show they have the paranoid guts to say what the base is really thinking about DEI or demonstrate their watery innards when they weasel away from saying it. Get them off their talking points. Get them stuttering. Get them looking bad.
Build the message and the frame and the political capital for the governor to use. In media accounts and interviews, in YouTube clips (it’s the only reason Republicans ever speak in Congress anymore).
Even if she decides it's best spent beating back sexist and intrusive questionnaires about reasons for abortion (which also have larger strategic purposes for the Right), or further lie-based restrictions on the franchise, the law that goes into effect will be a tarnished victory for the GOP, more people hear the real reasons it was put forward, more people tie it in with the national crazies and see our Wheat-State varieties as doing their part in the great Republican Ventriloquist Act.
You can win a few things, even when you lose. You just have to fight smart enough to do so.
I know, I know: we're all just focused on getting warm bodies into races so we won't be uncontested all over the place. That's important. And yes, any great journey begins with the first step. But we have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. (Just how many hackneyed sayings can I stack up here?)
Getting bodies in races is key. In that process, a lot of us acknowledge many of these newbie candidates will not win their first time out, yet the process is still worth the effort. It accomplishes a lot, including floating viewpoints and narratives the GOP will never utter and viscerally hate when they do get uttered. It's like rhetorical terrorism: when someone slightly left of John Birch suggests something less cruel than the Hunger Games, conservatives tend to freak out and demonize them, and that just shows us who they are, further turning the normies against the reactionaries. Again, even losing can lay the ground for winning, not just elections, but generalized rejections of the Right's toxic worldview.
After getting bodies into races, getting bodies into office is important, and there’s effort underway there as well. But getting some savvy and strategy into our already-electeds is unbelievably key. Working together, strategizing, tag-teaming, seeing this all as bigger than just their home districts because these laws affect the whole state. If you can't be collegial with the Republicans one second, then return to full-on suspicion that they're going to stab you in the back and reinstitute slavery in America, you shouldn't be doing this. Grant that they may love their dogs and grandkids—who doesn't?—but they want to run over demonstrators in the street, and lock up all the homeless, and your job is to make it as hard as possible for them to do that.
And attention to the larger picture is also key. If you want poly-sci wonkery, read The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized, by Daniel J. Hopkins. There are no easy solutions to the fact that people know Nancy Pelosi and AOC but not Ty Masterson, Dan Hawkins and even Laura Kelly, so we're going to continue to see legislative measures driven by national hysterias that serve nutjob outfits like Leonard Leo's various projects and the Heritage Foundation more than the people of Grinnell or Falun.
If you're not following those trends, or imagining that they're not relevant to us here in Kansas, you're going to get whupped by the useful idiots here at home, even though they can't qualify as extras in crowd scenes in the big dramas.
Acting stunned and asking What's this got to do with Kansas? isn't going to work when the GOP base is huffing straight batshittery from Fox and worse outlets every night about all the heinous evil The Left is up to. So you need to keep tabs on that, be able to counter that just as much as if you were a national politician. Steven Howe laundered model legislation from a national organization, FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, hardly a home-grown outfit, and we got caught with our pants down about framing, messaging, and the specific kinds of bad-faith supporters would bring to the debates. That needn’t have happened, because FIRE and their handmaidens have pulled this shit in other places before.
National Dems have everyone sick of hearing "Just vote harder!" and the only thing that's saved the national Democratic brand has been the obstructionist performances of the narcissist caucuses blocking everything from Service Branch appointments to military aid to humanitarian aid to border control (i.e., Bluff Calling the Immigrant Haters, i.e., Selling Out Migrants to Make a Point). The professed inability to do anything about manifestly bad things and bad actors is presently driving disaffection with the Dems on issue after issue. That suppresses turnout and undermines enthusiasm.
You know what counters that effect? Fighters. Smart ones. Brave ones.
Content from Democratic sources these days sings of young people getting involved with the party. That’s great. But one lesson we have to bear in mind is the problem of [BLANK] faces in high places problem.
Black faces in high places, Brown, Women’s, LGBTQIA+, Poor, Public Defender, or Young—doesn’t matter. I mean it does matter, as far as it goes. These aren’t bad winnowing attributes for zeroing in on folks whose backgrounds suggest they come from places less subject to many of the systemic blind spots we’re historically subject to. Backgrounds that imply they may get certain things better than the average cis-straight middle-aged, middle-class, Protestant white male attorney or insurance agent we tend to elect in Kansas.
But we cheer the queer lady and get…Kristin Sinema. We are thrilled to see the first openly gay man run for president but he’s…Mayor Pete. And if a Black face is all we care about, there’s Thurgood Marshall…and then there’s Clarence Thomas. There’s Angela Davis…and then there’s Candace Owens.
Get new bodies in races. Get these bodies into office. And get them support and training and guidance and advice and savvy as quick as it can be infused into their bloodstreams if they don’t already have it by the grace of God or their own hard work and study.
And not just “here’s how it works / has always worked / that’ll never fly” advice and guidance. This is not your parents’ America—or Kansas—any more. And the A-Number 1 turnoff to young people getting involved in politics is old people wedded to their own egos as party stalwarts insisting that every lesson they learned under the old rules and games is absolutely transferable and 100 percent applicable to today’s reality.
Some of those lessons still apply, may always apply to some extent. But this is virgin territory in a lot of ways. We don’t know what works anymore until we play around with the inherited melody and riff on it. The Right is not afraid to throw a thousand things at the wall to see what sticks. They’re not afraid to let their fringes rant sheer madness without a peep of repudiation. Our fringes are so not fringe it’s obscene, so far have we gone to cater to some ever-rightward-drifting middle that we’re now debating whether trans PEOPLE deserve to exist in the Free State.
The age of bipartisan reasonableness is over in Washington. Just as anyone would scoff at the idea of the world suddenly agreeing to dismantle all nuclear warheads and forget the knowledge of how to make them, I don’t believe we’re going to see America choose to dismantle the performative obstruction of the Right-wing bomb-throwers or abandon the appeal to fascism. It goes against the record of history and every observable incentive.
Kansas lags behind national trends, but it’s not immune from them. So get ready. We’re already outnumbered, so naked power steamrolling us will become more and more obvious.
But there’s a reason that dude facing down the tanks in Tiananmen Square is a powerful symbol to this day. Quit acting like bipartisan beggars is the only role to audition for. Activists know that you can gain a lot by losing well and valiantly.