Hating MLK, Migrants, and Women in MAGAland
I shudder to think what this country will be like once we’re finished with 2024. Today I’ll share three instances offering proof of the insidious nature of today’s reactionaries.
The window of what’s considered decent human behavior has shifted so far right as to encourage desecration of heroes like Martin Luther King.
The Texas governor's only regret about his border schemes is that his guys can’t outright kill migrants because the Biden administration might consider it murder.
Forced birthers aren’t stopping with the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
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Martin Luther King was a radical. And the racists who hated him have returned to the forefront of the movement to turn our country into an authoritarian theocracy. The national holiday celebrating his birthday –something made politically possible by popular demand– is now an occasion by these white supremacists to launch posthumous smears on his legacy.
Turning Point USA is a scammy operation claiming to recruit younger people to ultra-conservative activism. Leader Charlie Kirk has used his position to become a strident voice in the culture wars. Whether it’s misogyny, racism, or homophobia, Kirk is always ready to stir the pot, in part to ‘own the libs’ and in part to keep his operation in the news.
The mythology of the Second Amendment is regularly feature on his tour of college campuses and conservative congregations. “It’s worth the cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.”
He’s been touring with ReAwaken America gang, the pseudo revivalist campaign with former General Michael Flynn and a host of fringe characters who ladle out conspiracy theories and pledge their loyalty to the MAGA movement.
Locally, Kirk’s a favorite son of the Awaken Church. In March 2023 he took to the stage with church leader Jurgen Matthesius at an Awaken San Marcos campus event to speak out against anti-racism.
There is only one true religion (evangelical MAGAism), he said, and “five fake religions”, including “Earth Worshipers,” “Power,” “Scientism,” “Tolerance.” The most dangerous of these, he told the crowd in Salt Lake City, is “Anti-racism and the cult of DEI.” (Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs)
He says the last one is “the biggest and immediate threat to the American republic.”
Via Left Coast Rightwing Watch:
“The religion of Anti-racism and the cult of diversity,” Kirk says, is the “biggest threat to the American republic.” He goes on to complain about “Black only graduations.” The ceremonies like ‘Black Graduation’ Kirk is referring to are typically special events for students of color held by alumni associations or other groups and happen separately from the official graduation. But Kirk paints them in a different light.
“No whites are allowed, Jurgen!” Kirk says to Matthesius.
Kirk then bizarrely suggests events like Black or Hispanic Graduation weren’t by and for people in those groups. Instead, he says they were thought up by “white liberal suburban wine moms” who feel empty inside because they’ve rejected Christianity and use “the religion of anti-racism and DEI” as a substitute. These white women, Kirk says, hate themselves and think they have to atone for being white by ”donating to BLM” and “apologizing for how they look”.
In keeping with his frightful claims about what in earlier times would have been called “race mixing,” Kirk has vowed to use January 15 (Martin Luther King J observed) as the time to attack the civil rights leader and the things the movement accomplished.
At America Fest in December 2023, he told the crowd, “MLK was awful. He's not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn't believe.”
, “We're gonna be hitting him next week...on MLK Day. We're gonna do the thing you're not supposed to do. We're gonna tell the truth about MLK Jr.” This “truth,” according to Kirk and his collaborator Blake Neff, involves portraying King as linked to violence after the Civil Rights Act.
By the way, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, according to this perspective, was aimed at fomenting intolerance and should be repealed.
Kirk– “I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I’ve thought about it. We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”
I once again remind people that the Awaken Church has multiple “campuses” in San Diego County, including their newest location at the Legacy Center in Mission Valley, where Charlie Kirk can spread his hate.
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Three migrants drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande river after Texas state troopers and National Guard members took “full control” of an area called Shelby Park, putting wire up around it.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered the Texas National Guard to block U.S. Border Patrol agents from entering a two-and-a-half mile stretch of the river border with Mexico at Eagle Pass.
The US Border patrol agents weren’t able to launch a boat to rescue a woman and two children. So they died. And investigation has been launched, and the federal government is seeking to have the judiciary tell the Texas governor that federal authority over state authority amounts to settled law.
Abbott doesn’t seem to care, even as he’s bussing barefoot and coatless migrants to northern cities in freezing weather to “own the libs.” The high temperature in Chicago today was forecast to be Zero, with a wind chill of minus twenty to minus thirty five.
Who needs gas chambers when a few chartered buses sent to Black majority cities with winter weather and Mayors who happen to be non-white will do?
This is happening right now in the USA.
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Finally (for today), there are the real consequences of the Republican war on women.
The Supreme Court is going to give an expedited review on the question of whether emergency room doctors can perform medically necessary abortions in states that prohibit them.
An all-male panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has held that emergency rooms are not required to perform life-saving abortions for women who show up having medical emergencies
Idaho, with the backing of a conservative anti-abortion group, maintains that their law criminalizing all abortions should trump federal medicare regulations requiring hospital emergency rooms to provide stabilizing treatment to all patients, regardless of underlying factors. The state is contesting a district court ruling putting state law on hold while a case is argued on appeal.
Via CNN:
The Justice Department warned the justices that the law’s provision could have “devastating harms” for women in the state and urged the court to keep that part of it on pause.
“As the district court recognized, when state law criminalizes essential care required by federal law, ordinary principles of preemption require state law to give way,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said in court papers.
“The narrow preliminary injunction is preserving the status quo and protecting women and doctors in Idaho from the devastating harms that would result if doctors could be subjected to criminal prosecution for providing essential emergency care,” Prelogar wrote.
States that have banned and/or criminalized abortion are using prescription information from drugstore chains to track women’s health as Los Angeles columnist Michael Hiltzik revealed last week.
Chains granting access to patient records without legal review include CVS, Kroger, and Rite Aid. None of the major chains surveyed required a warrant, and only Amazon said it notified patients of law enforcement inquiries.
The Federal Trade Commission last week reached a settlement prohibiting the sale of customers’ geo-location data by data broker Outlogic .
FTC Chair Lina Khan, in at least one contract the company had tracked “Ohio residents who visited specific doctors, including cardiologists, gastroenterologists, or endocrinologists, and then pharmacies or specialty infusion centers.”
The quest by antiabortion prosecutors for data pertaining to out-of-state medical procedures is destined to grow. The proportion of patients traveling out of their home states to obtain abortions has doubled over the last three years to 20% in the first six months of 2023 from 10% in the same period in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The rate is especially high in safe-haven states bordered by antiabortion states, such as Illinois, where out-of-state patients increased in early 2023 to 18,870 from 5,570 three years earlier. New Mexico and Colorado experienced sharp increases for the same reason. In California, where abortions increased by 15,200 in the statistical period, only 16% of the increase was due to out-of-state patients — presumably because abortion is legal in the nearby states of Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
What is becoming clear as state legislators take advantage of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of medical privacy rights in the Dobbs decision, is that the stakes are destined to become magnified in the absence of federal action. People suffering from infectious diseases linked to what legislators disdain as immoral behavior such as HIV or hepatitis C might face increased discrimination or limits on access to public healthcare programs, for example.
Jill Filipovic did a rundown on the post Dobbs cases where states have taken what used to be considered extraordinary actions against women.
“Forced Birthers” is what anti-abortionists should be called. The religious definition of human existence is to be forced on the entire population. Women have a duty, according to this belief,
to meet the needs of others, serving naturally superior men and children whose lives are of supreme importance. No “worthy” woman should prioritize their wishes over this duty.
And so this is the plan in the US: Force women to carry pregnancies against their will. If they have medical emergencies or their fetuses have serious problems, force them to continue the pregnancies anyway — forms, I would argue, of physical torture. If the women die, they die — it’s a tragedy, not a man-made killing, and what kind of woman wouldn’t die to keep her child alive? If women make one wrong step — if they seek abortion care out of state, if they are given a medically-necessary abortion, even if they miscarry — the first reaction should be suspicion, and the second an attempt to criminalize their disobedience.
It has only been a year and a half since the Dobbs decision and the tsunami of anti-abortion laws it brought. The devastation has been vast and deep and personal. And the anti-abortion movement is just getting started.
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Monday’s Substackers Worth Noting
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Every Pay Bump Is an Admission of Guilt Via How Things Work by Hamilton Nolan
The economic crime is more specific than not paying workers what they deserve. It is the crime of not paying workers what they could be paid. It is the crime—which is inherent in the capitalist workplace arrangement, and which is taught at business schools as basic good management technique—of a business reserving for itself money that it could be giving to the people who do the work while still remaining a healthy business. What businesses typically say when workers ask for more money is: “We can’t afford it. It will put the business at risk.” But these sorts of sudden raises give the lie to that pose. These raises are the business equivalent of a rich guy who is refusing to give you what he promised for cutting his lawn all of a sudden coming up with the money when you threaten to punch him in the face. Yeah, you had that money the whole time! It was always there!
Compounding this economic crime is the fact that even when businesses feel some amount of pressure from organized labor power, they still don’t give workers all of the money to which they are entitled. They give it in drips and drabs. They try always to give the smallest possible amount in order to get the business running as usual again. These preemptive raises from nonunion automakers should be understood as a man walking down the street with a sackful of gold tossing out a few pennies to the poor and hoping that they are satisfied enough with that that they don’t demand more. The only way to get the full amount that the company is capable of giving you is to say to it: Give us what we’re worth or you will have neither workers nor a business any more. You have to put their backs fully up against the wall. That is accomplished by collective bargaining, which is accomplished by a union.
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MAGA World's Barcalounger Terrorists Via SpyTalk by Jeff Stein
A 2019 warning from Russell Travers, then-acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, remains apt nearly five years down the road. In a prescient piece after Trump fired him, Travers wrote, “Over the last several years…the United States has seen a resurgence of non-Islamist leaderless terrorism. Left-wing anarchists and antifascists remain a violent threat. So do right-wing antigovernment militias. But the greatest cause for concern is white supremacist violence. With a long, sordid history in the United States, white supremacists have not gone away.”
Travers has come out of retirement to pitch in with the intelligence wing at DHS, which the Biden Administration re-empowered in 2021, along with other federal, state and other agencies, to tackle “Domestic Violent Extremism,” but the White House remains skittish about casting a dragnet upon the good ol’ white boys who make up the core of violent MAGA America.
Even if, in an unimaginable scenario today, Congress did authorize the feds to launch a nationwide crackdown on violence-prone malcontents akin to the FBI’s 60s-era COINTEL program, it should be obvious by now that we can’t arrest our way out of the MAGA world threat matrix, any more than eradicating the leaders of al Qaeda, ISIS or Hamas will vanquish Palestinian aspirations.There’s a widespread fear and loathing over the rapid cultural and economic changes roiling America. Relegating Trump to the ash heap of history will only slow it down
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Teaching journal 1/3 - 1/15 (2024 not off to a great start) Via AwkwardSD by Ryan Bradford
Friday came and I found myself in a room with about 30 other teachers. “If you are sitting in this room, it means that your position is going to be eliminated next year.”
It’s called being excessed—not laid off or fired. When school sites no longer have the funds (which are based on enrollment) to support staff, positions are eliminated and the teachers who occupied them are moved to a different role elsewhere in the district.
Before winter break, my supervisor had warned me that there were going to be major cuts coming, so the news wasn’t a complete surprise, but it was still a gut-punch. As the director tried to ease the news by suggesting that this could be an opportunity for us to seek other areas of interest, I just looked down at my shoes, fixating on the sweat stains in the canvas.
The news means that next year, I’ll be teaching somewhere else. It means I’ll have to interview. It means I probably won’t be able to walk to school anymore. It means I’ll no longer be working with my friends. I won’t be able to see any of my students next year. Or the year after that. I won’t be able to have better conversations with them as their English improves. I won’t see them graduate.
Seeing that I only have about six more months in this role, I decided to start journaling the experience. \