Newson Recall Is DOA: Right Wing Politics in a Post-Pandemic World
California Gov. Gavin Newsom made --what many assume was-- an announcement about the end of pandemic restrictions effective June 15. People hear what they want to hear, and despite the Big IF buried in this announcement, the consensus I saw in this morning’s news was that “Reopening” is a done deal.
While the authentication of signatures on recall petitions isn’t finished, it doesn’t make much difference now. The best that Golden State gadflies can do at this point is to strut around and claim their effort caused the end of pandemic restrictions.
https://twitter.com/dougporter506/status/1379780422675038213?s=20
Life getting back to some semblance of “normal” is the worst thing that could happen for the motley coalition behind the Recall Newsom movement. It will be harder to leverage victimhood into political expression when better times are upon us. In short, their movement is toast.
Make no mistake about it, the underlying conditions driving this political organizing by the right are the same as those that prompted the January 6th insurrection in Washington DC.
Telling people that some entity is or will be taking something of value from them is fundamental to the right wing’s strategy. In the case of the Capitol riots, that thing was the reelection of Dear Leader. At the state level this has meant portraying public health measures as a threat to people’s livelihoods.
While this “taking” is packaged as an expression of economic insecurity, a deeper dive into what’s actually occurring points to racism. The entire rationale for the right these days is premised on the fear of rising numbers of non-whites in society.
Of course, today’s bigotry has moved past vulgarities and blatant symbols. Now it’s all about code words. Yesterday’s ‘welfare queens driving Cadillacs’ and ‘superpredators’ have become illegal voters and Chinese superspreaders.
Say what? Am I playing the “race card?” You bet I am. Because it’s the truth, even if the foot soldiers of these rebellions think otherwise.
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Robert A. Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, has undertaken a study of those arrested in the wake of the events on January 6th.
Working with court records they looked at the demographics and home county characteristics of the 377 Americans, from 250 counties in 44 states, arrested or charged in the Capitol attack.
But by far the most interesting characteristic common to the insurrectionists’ backgrounds has to do with changes in their local demographics: Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges...
...When compared with almost 2,900 other counties in the United States, our analysis of the 250 counties where those charged or arrested live reveals that the counties that had the greatest decline in White population had an 18 percent chance of sending an insurrectionist to D.C., while the counties that saw the least decline in the White population had only a 3 percent chance. This finding holds even when controlling for population size, distance to D.C., unemployment rate and urban/rural location. It also would occur by chance less than once in 1,000 times.
Put another way, the people alleged by authorities to have taken the law into their hands on Jan. 6 typically hail from places where non-White populations are growing fastest.
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I can just about hear the California recallers howling over being called racists. And I’m not saying petition gathering or petition signing folks are necessarily flying the Confederate flag at home. But...
There can be no denying the reality of this movement coming out of the bowels of bigots. As the Sacramento Bee and other publications have noted, Orrin Heatlie, the ex-Sheriff from Yolo, who initiated the recall campaign, has an undeniable history of racist trash talking on social media.
From a Bee editorial:
There are valid criticisms of Newsom. We’ve outlined many of them in these pages. It’s likely that some Democratic and independent voters signed the recall petition. By and large, however, the recall movement is driven largely by extreme right-wing figures who support Donald Trump and oppose vaccinations.
At a time when hate crimes against Asian-Americans are on the rise, somebody over at the recall movement thought it was cool to be posting comments (since deleted) about the Chinese or Wuhan virus.
One doesn’t have to look very hard at the language used by organizers to find references to “illegal” aliens and/or suggestions that businesses owned by immigrants have received favorable treatment.
And then there’s the ginned up controversy suggesting that teachers in San Diego were being taken away from their duties to provide instruction for migrant children being housed at the convention center.
There can be no claims of a misunderstanding with this ploy. We’re looking at a classic misinformation effort aimed at creating anger at human beings designated as “others”.
Scott Lewis and Andy Keats nailed it at the Voice of San Diego Politics Report:
It started with County Supervisor Jim Desmond conflating the County Office of Education with the San Diego Unified School District.
Somehow a call for volunteer teachers from throughout the County was connected to schools shuttered because they were unsafe for students and staff. Something was being “denied” the good citizens of the city in favor of “others,” according to this logic.
“We have 130,000 kids who haven’t been allowed in a classroom for over a year in the San Diego Unified School District. It’s great that there’s in-person learning for those unaccompanied minors from Central America, but I wish every child in San Diego County was allowed the same opportunity for in-person teaching,” Desmond told the Washington Examiner.
He knows San Diego Unified isn’t providing in-person learning to unaccompanied minors. But that’s what took fire.
Real Fox News Anchor: “Outrage in San Diego tonight as parents learn teachers from San Diego Unified School District are teaching migrant children in person while American students in San Diego are still remote learning right now.”
From there it just went nuts. New York Post: “Outrage as migrant kids get in-person schooling before locals in San Diego.”
I feel some sympathy for the small business owners who’ve been used as poster children for the Recall/Reopen movement. The pandemic was/is an economic nightmare for millions of people.
Blaming other people, as far as I know, has never been a path for economic restoration; it is, however, a good way to gin up anger.
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Since I touched on schools in the past few paragraphs, a few words about the ReOpen Schools groups are in order.
Once again, there are plenty of parents and children whose lives have been turned upside down over the past year. They, like most of us, yearn for some semblance of normalcy again.
But now that things are headed back in that direction, it’s time to take a hard look at some of these “ReOpen’ groups.
I don’t personally know Nicole Elan, but her research on the San Diego based group calling itself The Parent Association serves as an excellent example of what happens when you start turning over the rocks that some leaders of these groups live under.
She followed the trail of breadcrumbs left by a member/director from the Parent Association to a public Facebook page called San Diego Schools.
https://twitter.com/nicole_chenelle/status/1379555658480054273?s=20
This individual listed their employer as Transparent California, which bills itself as a database on public pay and pensions. Dig past their innocuous web landing page and you’ll discover their blog (a firehose of information on ‘bad’ actors, from teachers to BART janitors) along with the fact the group’s funding comes from the Nevada Policy Research Institute. (Transparent California was founded by the California Policy Center)
Funding for the NPRI comes from a gaggle of right wing dark money donors, including Koch Brothers conduits DonorTrust and Donors Capital Fund. Moving up the right wing food chain, these groups are all part of a larger entity called the State Policy Network (SPN).
From SourceWatch:
The State Policy Network (SPN) is a web of right-wing “think tanks” and tax-exempt organizations in 50 states, Washington, D.C., Canada, and the United Kingdom. As of August 2020, SPN's membership totals 162. Today's SPN is the tip of the spear of far-right, nationally funded policy agenda in the states that undergirds extremists in the Republican Party.
SPN describes itself as a network and service organization for the "state-based free market think tank movement," and its stated mission is "to provide strategic assistance to independent research organizations devoted to discovering and developing market-oriented solutions to state and local public policy issues."[1] It was founded in November 1991[2] and incorporated in March of 1992.[3]
SPN groups operate as the policy, communications, and litigation arm of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), giving the cookie-cutter ALEC agenda a sheen of academic legitimacy and state-based support.
SPN and its "think tanks" are largely funded by right-wing special interest groups and individuals, including the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, the Coors family, the Walton Family Foundation, the Roe Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and Searle Freedom Trust.
Take five minutes on Google to see just where these folks stand on public education, namely, that “government schools” are a bad thing.
If you think of public schools as the foundation of democracy like I do, it shouldn’t take too much thinking to see what their ultimate goal is.
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Lead image: Aaron Bauer / Flickr