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Tag: cancel culture
'Full Armor Of God’: DeSantis Goes Biblical In Anti-Gay Political War

'Full Armor Of God’: DeSantis Goes Biblical In Anti-Gay Political War

Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis appears to be using the “Don’t Say Gay“ legislation he signed into law with barely any notice Monday as the new flag of his bible-based anti-LGBTQ re-election campaign.

“Gird your loins for battle. We are going to fight. You put on the full armor of God,” the Florida Republican running for re-election says in a video posted to social media this week, with the state flag behind him and a poster reading, “Keep Florida Free.”

“You take a stand against the Left’s schemes. Yeah, you’re gonna face flaming arrows, but if you stand for truth, you and we will prevail.”

Former federal prosecutor Ron Filipkowski weighed in, saying: “Desantis gets sexual and biblical on the campaign trail.”

The full biblical reference makes DeSantis’ remarks even more disturbing. They come from Ephesians 6:11-18, which mentions the devil and the spiritual forces of evil, It reads in part:

“Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. … In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”

Watch:

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Mimicking GOP, Putin’s Spy Chief Whines About ‘Cancel Culture’

Mimicking GOP, Putin’s Spy Chief Whines About ‘Cancel Culture’

Eight days after Russia illegally invaded a sovereign country to overthrow its government, reportedly killing thousands of Ukrainian troops and civilians, Vladimir Putin‘s spy chief is now decrying the international sanctions that have crushed the Russian economy.

Russian Foreign Intelligence Service director Sergey Naryshkin, using language that many are saying could have been written by the American far-right or Fox News, said:

“The masks are off. The West isn’t simply trying to close off Russia behind a new iron curtain. This is about an attempt to ruin our government – to ‘cancel’ it, as they now say in ‘tolerant’ liberal-fascist circles.”

The quote was posted by The Washington Post’s national security reporter Paul Sonne.

It’s important to note that the Soviet Union “built” the “iron curtain” to separate the USSR from the West, so the analogy is historically inaccurate, misleading, and as some suggest, smacks of false victimhood.

Naryshkin was infamously slammed by Putin at a Kremlin meeting aired around the world last week. Now once again he is being blasted – and widely mocked:

“Cancel culture strikes again,” wroteThe Atlantic’s Molly Jong-Fast in response to Naryshkin’s remarks.

“They are really desperate to change the narrative here. If you start a war, you can’t then pretend that YOU are the victim of cancel culture,” a Twitter user replied in agreement.

“This kind of language is exactly the same as the gop messaging from elected officials to tv personalities to online influencers & internet trolls. It’s the same twisting of words and meaning smothered with a thick sauce of contempt. See it?” noted another social media user.

Foreign and defense policy writer, professor of national security and strategy at the U.S. Army War College Steve Metz replied: “No Sergei, the world is trying to cancel your war criminal, nazi like aggression. The world held its nose and tolerated your fascist government before that.”

“We’ve seen claims of “cancel culture victimhood” from bigots, white supremacists, sexual harassers, rapists, public masterbators, and many others, but this one might trump them all (so to speak). Ridiculous,” added another Twitter user.

“Isn’t it interesting that he uses the same language as Fox News?” asked WGN anchor Steve Grzanich.

He was not alone in that observation.

Clemens Wergin, the chief correspondent for German news outlet Welt: “Everybody is a Nazi or a Fascist it seems who doesn’t do what Russia’s kleptocratic dictatorship wants.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Trump's Mob: Gullible, Conspiracy-Minded, And Willfully Ignorant Of History

Trump's Mob: Gullible, Conspiracy-Minded, And Willfully Ignorant Of History

Driving home from the Dog Park, I was surprised to hear the (Dixie) Chicks terrific song Wide Open Spaces on the country oldies station. The group had been banished from country radio since 2003 after saying George W. Bush made them embarrassed to be Texans.

Now that Bush has made Donald Trump's unofficial Enemies List, the Chicks are evidently forgiven after 18 years. Meanwhile, most of my friends in Texas are embarrassed, but not because of Dubya — the make-believe rancher who's given up brush-clearing to paint portraits of lap dogs and his own feet.

And more power to him: the only Republican presidential candidate since 1988 to win an actual national majority. That was in 2004, with Bush still popular due to his ultimately disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. (I was myself removed from a college teaching job after a series of columns arguing that the Bush administration's case for attacking Saddam Hussein was transparently fraudulent.)

But I digress. Never mind that Bush was the worst president in living memory, dragging the country into futile wars on false premises and presiding over the 2008 banking crisis. Before the roof fell in, he did achieve an actual majority .

And a big part of what's going on in the United States today is that no Republican candidate—very much including Trump — has much chance of winning a national majority in the foreseeable future. This appears to have made an awful lot of Americans —particularly under-educated white ones, to be perfectly blunt — scared half to death.

Seemingly fearful of being relegated to second-class status, many "Real Americans," as they're styled on Fox News, appear eager to embrace minority rule. So long as they're the ones wielding power, that is. Tucker Carlson tells them that Democrats are scheming to "replace" them with aggrieved and undeserving voters of different races.

Because they're gullible and prone to apocalyptic thinking — "the rapture" was all the rage in evangelical circles not long ago — one result has been a succession of what can what can only be described as "moral panics" over largely imaginary threats such as "Sharia Law," "Cancel Culture," and "Critical Race Theory." Since 2010, for example, several states have found it necessary to ban Islamic religious courts from exercising legal authority.

As if.

Those states are: Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Dakota, and Tennessee. Notice anything else about them?

Even the stuffiest Republican thinkers can get all worked up over the follies of campus leftists, of which there's never any shortage. The Washington Post's George Will wrote a stern column recently about a fracas involving a professor of management at UCLA, who unwisely engaged a student who worried that having to take a final exam would injure "the mental and physical health of our Black classmates" traumatized by George Floyd's murder.

The professor replied with mild sarcasm, asking how he was supposed to identify Black students in an online course. Also. what about racially mixed students, of which UCLA has many? For this, the poor dope got suspended from teaching, banned from campus, and denounced by spineless administrators. (He's been reinstated and has filed a lawsuit.)

Well, he should have known better, although I'm prone to bickering and sarcasm myself. I'm also familiar with humorless campus leftists. My wife and I were once admonished by professorial guests for owning a Merle Haggard album. We thought Okie from Muskogee was funny; they thought it a fascist outrage. (Haggard himself was surprised so few got the joke.)

And speaking of "cancel culture," public school teachers and administrators nationwide are being harassed and run out of their jobs for the largely imaginary crime of teaching "Critical Race Theory."

In Grapevine, Texas, a Black high school principal got fired for the sin of writing a letter to colleagues expressing the anodyne view that "Education is the key to stomping out ignorance, hate, and systemic racism." (Also for having ten years ago posted a Facebook photo of himself kissing his white wife.) In Queen Anne's County, Maryland a highly successful Black school superintendent was hounded from the district for expressing polite concerns about racial injustice.

Activists calling themselves "conservative" are besieging school boards across the country, basically arguing that history lessons about slavery and Jim Crow teach white children to be ashamed of their race and country. At Boise State University, they have proposed eliminating whole academic departments—Global Studies, Sociology and History—to combat left-wing dogma.

In other news, Trumpist Republicans are working systematically to rig the electoral system to bring their champion back to power regardless of voters' wishes. Never mind that Trump got more than 7 million fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020, losing the Electoral College by 306 to 232. With GOP state legislators counting the votes, an identical outcome in 2024 would make Trump a big, big winner.

At least that's the plan.

Late Rep. John Lewis with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

Students Don’t Need The Disney Version Of Our History

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call

The White House issued a proclamation last week, of the sort that most presidents have issued about historical events that deserve commemorating, but that were missing, for the most part, during the Trump reign.

This one marked the 60th anniversary of the first Freedom Rides, on May 4, 1961, when traveling on a bus meant risking your life, if you were with an integrated group, sitting in a spot of your choice. Those southbound heroes were willing to face beatings and the unknown at the hands of fellow citizens intent on stopping progress by any means necessary. Angry and afraid, the violent white supremacist mobs refused to acknowledge the humanity of African Americans or the validity of any law that looked forward not back.

It's the reality — and not the myth of uncomplicated greatness the country has told the world and itself for far too long.

And it's not always pretty.

For that reason, many Republicans want to "cancel" it, to use a word today's conservatives have been misusing with reckless abandon. They'd like to erase the history and the essential lessons that reveal so much about how and why America is so divided and its systems — of health care, housing, education, and more — so inequitable in 2021.

Why? Because for all the chest-thumping toughness so many Americans brag about, apparently white students are too fragile to hear the truth, or see the pictures on prized postcards that treated lynchings as entertainment for the whole family, an indictment of more than a few rogue racists.

Black students, of course, subject to disproportionate school suspensions, stereotypical assumptions from teachers, and keen scrutiny by law enforcement on their way to and from, and sometimes in, the classroom, know all too well that the problems they face stretch back 400 years and more. But the laws being passed and pushed in states across the country — no surprise — don't have them in mind.

Alternate Reality

For those making and debating these rules, in states such as Idaho, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas, creating an alternate reality, a version that resembles a Disneyfied diorama, is fine even if it is false, as long as it accommodates white feelings and gives in to white fears.

How will these laws be enforced? Government monitors? Would a fine be imposed if a teacher steps over some vague line? Well, yes, in Arizona, the penalty could be $5,000. If a curious student asks a question, will the teacher no longer be allowed to answer?

The late Rep. John Lewis, brave and persistent, who endured brutal beatings as a consequence of his civil rights activism —including his part in the Freedom Rides — would seem to be someone America's students could look up to. But I'm doubtful his march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 would make it past the curriculum censors since his attackers were agents of the state, enforcing unjust laws that prevented African Americans from voting, from living a free life.

Can you imagine? Students might make a connection between those troopers and Derek Chauvin, a murderer in a uniform, and want to learn about the racist history of policing in America. Plus, calling that day "Bloody Sunday" just wouldn't do.

It's no coincidence that the defenders of a white-washed version of history are in many cases the same legislators rushing through laws that criminalize the protesters who are the spiritual sons and daughters of Lewis.

Do these arbiters of education think that if students don't learn about Jim Crow, they won't see anything shameful about "Jim Crow 2.0" laws that restrict voting rights and harken back to post-Reconstruction rules enacted to crush the progress of those who, once unshackled, achieved elective office and thrived?

It's clear from the twisted views of America's past held by many of the staunchest defenders of the anti-history movement that a more inclusive curriculum is overdue, and they should sign up for a makeup class.

Get the dunce cap ready for Martha Huckabay, president of the Women's Republican Club of New Orleans, who defended Louisiana GOP state Rep. Ray Garofalo's words on teaching about the "good" parts of enslaving men, women, and children and offered choice thoughts of her own. Huckabay opined that slavery resulted in "hard working ethics" and that "many of the slaves loved their masters, and their masters loved them, and took very good care of them, and their families." Was she talking about the torture, the rape, or the selling of children away from moms and dads?

Tennessee Republican state Rep. Justin Lafferty somehow interpreted the three-fifths compromise in the original Constitution, which counted the enslaved as three-fifths of a human being, as a step toward ending slavery.

Colorado GOP state Rep. Ron Hanks said the three-fifths compromise "was not impugning anybody's humanity" — after he made a lynching joke. His Republican colleague, state Rep. Richard Holtorf, called another colleague the racist stereotype "Buckwheat," and insisted it had nothing — nothing — to do with race.

CNN contributor Rick Santorum has tried and failed miserably to explain his comments that "we birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans, but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture." Why, when he was a senator from Pennsylvania, could Santorum not be bothered to stroll to the National Museum of the American Indian? Was he too lazy or just incurious, either way not an example for school kids of any age?

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has weighed in on the debate. He seems fine with teaching the words of America's founding documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution. Does he want to stop there, leaving out how, when and why the country failed to live up to the lofty principles in those documents until forced to by true patriots? He has said the year 1619, when the first enslaved Africans arrived in colonial Virginia, means little to him. Considering his slave-owning ancestors benefited from trading and "owning" human beings and, presumably, passed the wealth on to family members, you'd think McConnell would be a little more "woke."

History Repeats

"The past is never dead. It's not even past," wrote William Faulkner. The depressing proof can be seen in the tiki-torch-carrying white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia., chanting, "Jews will not replace us!" You have to wonder if avowed neo-Nazi James Fields Jr., serving life in prison for the killing of Heather Heyer, would even be charged under new laws that give a pass and winking approval to drivers who mow down protesters blocking a roadway?

Just months ago, on January 6, violent, hate-filled mobs — cousins in crime to those who greeted the Freedom Riders — stormed the U.S. Capitol, attacking police with the same weapons of batons and bats, hoisting Confederate flags, erecting gallows, hunting for lawmakers and endangering democracy itself.

South Carolina, where Lewis was viciously attacked and left in a pool of blood at the Rock Hill stop of the original Freedom Rides, on Monday officially observed Confederate Memorial Day, honoring traitors who fought to split a nation over the issue of slavery.

This Monday.

How will the next generations do better if they are forbidden from learning the history they must not repeat?

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.