These are dark days indeed. I had to shut the TV off the other day because I just couldn’t take any more of Donald Trump’s unceasing lies. Deceit made so many times worse by the fact that Volodymyr Zelenskyy had to sit beside him knowing this was not the moment to school him. Such Trumpian idiocy: imagining and then saying out loud that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is “Biden’s War,” made so much worse by his nonsensical claims that he has ended six wars, followed by his rant about mail-in ballots.
Donald Trump spews falsehoods, manifesting ignorance as he unrelentingly attacks the very institutions that educate Americans and could surely teach him a thing or two. Our major universities, our schools from kindergarten on up, being hounded to rewrite American history in the image of MAGA. Museums pressured to sanitize their collections. The Kennedy Center invaded by an occupying army of the less talented, accompanied by the laughable suggestion we rename our center of the arts after the artless Melania—a massive attempt to stupefy the land.
As if “South Park” doesn’t have enough to work with. The president thinks it is probably best if we pretend slavery never happened, or at least sanitize it. And let’s not end there, he declares; how about we MAGA-ify the whole darn story of America?
It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing. Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history. To advance this policy, we will restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness –- igniting the imagination of young minds, honoring the richness of American history and innovation, and instilling pride in the hearts of all Americans.
[Emphasis added.]
The New York Times attempts to explain the inexplicable:
President Trump accused the Smithsonian Institution on Tuesday of focusing too much on ‘how bad slavery was’ and not enough on the ‘brightness’ of America as his administration conducts a wide-ranging review of the content in its museum exhibits …
The Times continues:
Mr. Trump made the comments a week after the White House told the Smithsonian that its museums would be required to adjust any content that the administration finds problematic in ‘tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals’ within 120 days. Taken together, the administration’s examination and Mr. Trump’s post on Tuesday were the latest example of Mr. Trump trying to impose his will on a cultural institution and minimize the experiences and history of Black people in the United States.
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has led an effort to purge diversity, equity and inclusion policies from the federal government and threatened to investigate companies and schools that adopt such policies. He has tried to reframe the country’s past involving racism and discrimination by de-emphasizing that history, preferring to instead spotlight a sanitized, rosy depiction of America.
The administration has worked to scrub or minimize government references to the contributions of Black heroes, from the Tuskegee Airmen, who fought in World War II, to Harriet Tubman, who guided enslaved people along the Underground Railroad. Mr. Trump commemorated Juneteenth, the celebration of the end of slavery in the United States that became a federal holiday in 2021, by complaining that there were too many non-working holidays in America. He has called for the return of Confederate insignia and statues honoring those who fought to preserve slavery.
[Emphasis added.]
I am so tired of the premature surrender of so many to Donald Trump and his Stephen Miller-led ignorant armies marching under the banner of “No DEI.” The convicted felon, with his pardoned January Sixers beside him (they who brutalized the D.C. Police), is now inflicting his twisted notion of law and order upon a stunned America. And the stupidest amongst us are now telling us what can be taught and what students can learn. They who debase the language when they twist and distort words like “truth” and “sanity” now want to police what we say. They who have been rummaging through each and every federal agency and each and every website purging the words that ironically actually reveal our real history and the complicated truth of the American experience.
Like the Chinese authoritarians who have erased the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Donald Trump wants to wipe away those who challenged bigotry and bias, those who struggled and beat the powerful forces that denied slaves their freedom, those who marched and sat-in and vanquished the segregationists who denied Black people their votes, those who defied the mythological, anti-historical stereotypes of man- and womanhood to pridefully love who they loved, those who never had a place in the American story as written by the wealthy white, male tyrants.
And so, according to The New York Times, here are some of the words MAGA is so terrified of:
While I can appreciate the bullying power of the current despots and how relentless their attacks can be, and yes, the financial costs of resistance, we are talking here about the very essence of our democracy. And it seems to me that those who surrender to the mad MAGA requests to whitewash our history resemble the British colonizers far more than the patriots who established our republic and authored the Bill of Rights.
So, I wonder, did the folks at the National Parks Service lose any sleep when, in service to the president, they removed Harriet Tubman from her own story? The Washington Post tells us in “Amid anti-DEI push, National Park Service rewrites history of Underground Railroad“:
Since Trump took office, the park service — an agency charged with preserving American history — has changed how its website describes key moments from slavery to Jim Crow.
For years, a National Park Service webpage introduced the Underground Railroad with a large photograph of its most famous ‘conductor,’ Harriet Tubman. ‘The Underground Railroad — the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War — refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage,’ the page began.
Tubman’s photograph is now gone. In its place are images of Postal Service stamps that highlight ‘Black/White cooperation’ in the secret network and that feature Tubman among abolitionists of both races. The introductory sentence is gone, too. It has been replaced by a line that makes no mention of slavery and that describes the Underground Railroad as ‘one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement.’ The effort ‘bridged the divides of race,’ the page now says.” Such an effort to make this a happy story. No acknowledgment that slaves who tried to escape were at best beaten, at worse killed. Or that Fugitive Slave Laws made it illegal to help slaves escape and legal to re-capture them.
You know, it wasn’t always this way. I can remember those Chevy commercials of the mid-1980s, the brainchild of adman Sean Kevin Fitzpatrick, who came up with the “Heartbeat of America” campaign. Some of those minute-long spots were like the very best of slideshows: country roads, farms and farmers, a lighthouse, soldiers, small-town parades, young love and old, and, of course, the flag. The Los Angeles Times tells the story of “the heartbeat’s” appeal, describing one New Jersey junior high school teacher’s letter to Chevrolet: “At a school assembly on health, a nurse started to explain to the students how to listen to their own heartbeats. At that, one student stood up and started to sing Chevrolet’s Heartbeat song. Pretty soon, the teacher wrote, the entire assembly was singing it.’”
There is one commercial from 1988 that is all about an America that belongs to us all, Black and white and in between, urban and rural, from east to west, all ages and occupations, in a mere minute. Somehow in 1988, Chevy believed they could sell their pickup trucks by highlighting the American melting pot. It is pretty clear to me that it is a commercial that won’t be made again as long as MAGA prevails. You won’t see that Black woman dancing exuberantly followed in a heartbeat by the white blonde woman waving her flag so proudly.
History books, if history survives, will tell the story of how MAGA undid decades of empathy, of mutual respect, of pride in the melting pot, of the collective memory that all of us—exempting the hapless victims, the natives—came from elsewhere not so long ago and that so many suffered the prejudice of the hateful. Not so long ago, even white grandparents and great grandparents—the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, for example—told those in their families who would listen of a time when the others, “the real Americans,” weren’t happy they had fled to here from there, the old countries.
History will record how easy it can be to tap into bias and fear and anger and transform frustration into hating the other, despising and distrusting those immigrants who made a similar journey to find a better life just like those grandparents. History knows well the efforts of the past and present tyrants to con and convince the many, many millions to hate the new “enemy” to distract as, all the while, they ceaselessly seize and hold power.
Now in America, we watch in real time as the millions dutifully fall for the fraudsters, the zillionaires, and their MAGA supplicants while they systematically trash the economy and the dollar we all depend on, as they hype and sell their own cryptocurrencies for massive profit. Asleep at the wheel and suffering from an ever-spreading amnesia, ordinary Americans seem not to see the disastrous effects of the president’s ridiculous tariffs.
Are the MAGA supplicants so distracted by the roundup of the “undocumented” and the false claims that the blue states are more dangerous than their own red states that they don’t see prices rise by the day? With West Virginia’s continuing opioid epidemic, should their National Guard really be on the streets of D.C.? How about the governor of Kentucky who diverts their National Guard from Louisville to D.C.? Louisville has a poverty rate of 15.6 percent, and while their violent crime rate is rated 46.1 out of a hundred (compared to DC’s 56.1), when it comes to property crime, Louisville beats D.C. 87.2 to 63.9. Though MAGA won’t admit it, perhaps there is a better place for the Kentucky National Guard.
Meanwhile, the Trumpians mercilessly fleece the distracted, laughing every step of the way as they transfer enormous wealth from the middle class to the one percent. Now, if you want to better understand what’s happening now, you have to go back to the MAGA playbook: Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership.”
It did not take long for the Trump administration to share their game plan:
Turning words inside out, Donald Trump claimed:
Longstanding Federal civil-rights laws protect individual Americans from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. These civil-rights protections serve as a bedrock supporting equality of opportunity for all Americans. As President, I have a solemn duty to ensure that these laws are enforced for the benefit of all Americans.
Yet today, roughly 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, critical and influential institutions of American society, including the Federal Government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) or ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation.
Illegal DEI and DEIA policies not only violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws, they also undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system. Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American Dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex.
[Emphasis added.]
Quite a concept: transforming the desire and mandate to include us all and the continuing attempt to ensure all are treated fairly into something to be feared and fought. Something we were once so very proud of is somehow now “Illegal DEI.”
Remember that list of words? Project 2025 made clear their desire to change the way we speak about America, think about America. They can’t stand the fact that, for all our differences, we have learned to share the same American dream. They want to make it so much harder to share the hopes and dreams of the Founders and why and how they crafted the Republic. Most of all, they need to rewrite our history and the lessons we impart to the young.
Project 2025’s section on education clearly states their mission: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” Why? Because “special interest groups like the National Education Association (NEA), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the higher education lobby have leveraged the agency to continuously expand federal expenditures.” Imagine, wanting to invest in and to improve public education. As opposed to the private schools to which they send their kids.
Not surprisingly, a good portion of that money goes to educating minorities and the handicapped. And it is all made worse when Democrats, like the Biden administration, require that “state education agencies and school districts submit ‘equity’ plans as a condition of receiving COVID recovery ESSER funds in the American Rescue Plan (ARP).”
In Truskmumpia, and for the folks at Project 2025, one thing so easily becomes its opposite: “Safeguarding civil rights. Enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory.” And here is another way of saying we need to spend less on educating the poor:
Transfer Title I, Part A, which provides federal funding for lower-income school districts, to the Department of Health and Human Services, specifically the Administration for Children and Families. It should be administered as a no-strings-attached formula block grant.
Similarly: “Transfer all Indian education programs to the Bureau of Indian Education.”
And:
The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides vouchers to low-income children living in the nation’s capital—appropriate as D.C. is under the jurisdiction of Congress—should be expanded into a universal program, formula-funded, and moved to the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is, of course, under the control of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now faithfully parroting the MAGA agenda and pressuring institutions like Harvard and Columbia to dispense with inclusion. HHS and the Department of Justice are tag-teaming major universities to change the way they hire, develop curriculum, and attract and admit students by withdrawing funding for a variety of the crucial research projects they have undertaken in the past. Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to endanger public health officials with his radical anti-vax rhetoric and makes it more and more difficult for all Americans to get vaccinated against fatal diseases like measles, influenza, and COVID and threatens public health by delaying the development of a vaccine against bird flu.
As for disabled Americans:
Most IDEA funding should be converted into a no-strings formula block grant targeted at students with disabilities and distributed directly to local education agencies by Health and Human Service’s Administration for Community Living.
And about civil rights violations:
Office for Civil Rights (OCR) – OCR should move to the Department of Justice. The federal government has an essential responsibility to enforce civil rights protections, but Washington should do so through the Department of Justice and federal courts. The OCR at DOJ should be able to enforce only through litigation.
As if Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has denied hundreds their habeas corpus rights and sent them to a Salvadoran hell-hole, can be relied upon to protect our civil rights.
And while Project 2025 is at it, why not just get rid of all those pesky programs that help the poor:
Thoroughly review the many education-related regulations promulgated by the Biden Administration, as well as the school meals program and the Income-Driven student loan program.
MAGA and Project 2025 make crystal clear their dislike of unions, especially teachers’ unions:
… the NEA and the nation’s other large teacher union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), use litigation and other efforts to block school choice and advocate for additional taxpayer spending in education. They also lobbied to keep schools closed during the pandemic. All of these positions run contrary to robust research evidence showing positive outcomes for students from education choice policies; there is no conclusive evidence that more taxpayer spending on schools improves student outcomes; and evidence finds that keeping schools closed to in-person learning resulted in negative emotional and academic outcomes for students. Furthermore, the union promotes radical racial and gender ideologies in schools that parents oppose according to nationally representative surveys.
The follow with this threat: “Members should conduct hearings to determine how much federal taxpayer money the NEA has used for radical causes favoring a single political party.”
MAGA clearly can’t stand the fact that schools have slowly and painstakingly and finally learned to recognize the complexities of gender in the world today, and MAGA will do anything to return to the pretend world of closeted America:
Civil Rights Data Collection – On December 13, 2021, OCR published a notice concerning proposed revisions … in which it proposed to create and collect data on a new ‘nonbinary’ sex category (in addition to the current ‘male’ or ‘female’ sex categories) …
To make this perfectly clear:
Work with Congress to amend Title IX to include due process requirements; define ‘sex’ under Title IX to mean only biological sex recognized at birth; and strengthen protections for faith-based educational institutions, programs, and activities.
Talk about how fear plus power becomes tyranny. MAGA won’t even countenance the possibility that there are those among us who are severely uncomfortable with the gender to which they were assigned at birth. Because for MAGA, acknowledgment and truth lead invariably to treatment. And that is clearly terrifying:
Facilitating social gender transition without parental consent increases the likelihood that children will seek hormone treatments, such as puberty blockers, which are experimental medical interventions. Research has not demonstrated positive effects and long-term outcomes of these treatments, and the unintended side effects are still not fully understood.
We have repeatedly learned from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that he just won’t accept any research that doesn’t support his unscientific and nonsensical lies.
Clearly, Project 2025 regards this an emergency:
On its first day in office, the next Administration should signal its intent to enter the rulemaking process to restore the Trump Administration’s Title IX regulation, with the additional insistence that ‘sex’ is properly understood as a fixed biological fact. Official notice-and-comment should be posted immediately.
[Emphasis added.]
So misguided is MAGA on the issue of gender that they confuse the healthy ability of young people to finally discuss and contemplate their own sexuality with a thoughtless, precipitous decision to undergo an exhaustive process to arrive at the gender assignment that truly works for them. Project 2025 continues:
As documented by writers such as Abigail Shrier and others, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons documented a four-fold increase in the number of biological girls seeking gender surgery between 2016 and 2017. Larger increases were found in the U.K. from 2009 to 2019 and 2017 to 2018. These statistics and others point to a social contagion in which minor children, especially girls, are attempting to make life-altering decisions using puberty blockers and other hormone treatments and even surgeries to remove or alter vital body parts. Heritage Foundation research finds that providing easier access to such treatments and surgeries without parental involvement does not reduce the suicidality of these young people and may even increase suicide rates.
[Emphasis added.]
How presumptuous and ignorant. As if someone would thoughtlessly embark on such a long and painful, often isolating journey on a whim or because of some imagined “social contagion” rather than an effort to reclaim their legitimate identity.
On to race. It seems Project 2025 is convinced it is time to go back to the days when kids of color could be punished the way they once were: “Unfortunately, federal overreach has pushed many school leaders to prioritize the pursuit of racial parity in school discipline indicators—such as detentions, suspensions, and expulsions—over student safety.”
Now here is a perfect example of how MAGA turns everything upside down in its efforts to reverse decades of social progress. Somehow, Critical Race Theory, a theory that emphasizes the need to appreciate and account for America’s embrace of slavery and segregation and the recognition of how our history of discrimination might have affected Native Americans and minorities, is magically transformed into the racism it addresses:
By its very design, critical race theory has an ‘applied’ dimension, as its founders state in their essays that define the theory. Those who subscribe to the theory believe that racism (in this case, treating individuals differently based on race) is appropriate—necessary, even—making the theory more than merely an analytical tool to describe race in public and private life. The theory disrupts America’s Founding ideals of freedom and opportunity. So, when critical race theory is used as part of school activities such as mandatory affinity groups, teacher training programs in which educators are required to confess their privilege, or school assignments in which students must defend the false idea that America is systemically racist, the theory is actively disrupting the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness.
[Emphasis added.]
So, historically, who exactly was it who treated “individuals differently based on race”? Perhaps, those who owned and controlled their slaves? Perhaps, those who enacted laws perpetuating segregation? Perhaps, the police who beat those marching for voting rights in Selma, Ala.? Surely not those who demand that the history we teach our children reflect that reality. Such is the absurdity of those in Truskmumpia who will stop at nothing to obscure the regrettable truth of systemic racism. Who choose to punish the truth-tellers not the racists. At the same time as he is erasing Harriet Tubman, Donald Trump is calling for the return of the statues of the Confederates who fought to retain slavery.
As for colleges, well, according to Project 2025, they have already been “captured by woke ‘diversicrats.’” And so it is necessary to deal with those responsible for accrediting institutions of higher education who “have forced colleges and universities, many of them faith-based institutions, to adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that conflict with federal civil rights laws, state laws, and the institutional mission and culture of the schools.”
And here is where Project 2025 foreshadows the current attempt to blackmail educational institutions into turning their backs on more than 60 years of social progress by claiming that they tolerate, even encourage antisemitism:
Perhaps more distressingly, accreditors, while professing support for academic freedom and campus free speech, have presided over a precipitous decline in both over the past decade. Despite maintaining criteria that demand such policies, accreditors have done nothing to dampen the illiberal chill that has swept across American campuses over the past decade.
Clearly, Critical Race Theory, DEI, gender neutrality, and unionization don’t represent MAGA’s idea of America, so it is time to make sure we require the next secretary of education “to allocate at least 40 percent of funding to international business programs that teach about free markets and economics and require institutions, faculty, and fellowship recipients to certify that they intend to further the stated statutory goals of serving American interests.”
Once upon a time, schoolchildren were taught about our Declaration of Independence:
These core principles, though certainly not always put into practice, became an essential element of what we have referred to as “The American Dream.” In these difficult days in Truskmumpia, you would never know it, but DEI is, in fact, our recent recasting of the Declaration of Independence. Thanks to the courage and bravery of countless generations of abolitionists, suffragettes, trade unionists, civil and gay/gender rights warriors, we have created other ways of extending the hard-won blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to our fellow Americans. Adopting and expanding the principles of the Founders to all who might have endured that long train of abuses and usurpations, who have suffered from a homegrown form of Despotism because, in effect, it is our right and duty to reform our government and address those abuses. And is there a better way to deliver on these promises than to embrace diversity, to incorporate fairness and equity in all our dealings, and to wholeheartedly guarantee inclusion and equal participation to all? Yes, it is today’s DEI.
The great George Orwell, not long after going to Spain to see for himself and participate in the international resistance to Franco’s fascism, made these telling observations in “Politics and the English Language” about the distortion of language that accompanies authoritarianism:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
MAGA and the pro-Trump right, with the help of Rupert Murdoch and his media network, have mastered “the defence of the indefensible” and the unrelenting attack of what used to be the pillars of the American experience, the core of our exceptionalism: civil rights, free speech, religious tolerance, and the concern for those with less.
They have camouflaged their racism by accusing their victims of racism. Though they themselves are antisemites, they have charged universities and colleges with antisemitism to force them to abandon efforts to add more minorities to their faculties and student bodies, to restrict the numbers of international students from non-white nations, and tp restrict their curriculums and purge as many of those dreaded words from the works they study.
The New York Times puts it bluntly:
The New York Times writes:
Using the full power of the federal government, President Trump has promoted a vision of America that challenges the legitimacy of the Black experience. President Trump accused the Smithsonian Institution this week of focusing too much on ‘how bad slavery was’ and not enough on the ‘brightness’ of America. He has ordered Confederate statues honoring those who fought to preserve slavery to be restored and celebrated. And he used language carrying uncomfortable racial overtones to describe Washington, a historically Black city, as a hotbed of ‘savagery, filth and scum’ in need of ‘beautification.’
Over the past seven months, Mr. Trump’s words and actions have revealed what he sees as an ideal picture of the United States, in which the concept of diversity is taboo; the traditional power centers in America — white and wealthy men — get the benefit of the doubt; immigrants are suspect or unwelcome; and people of color must set their grievances and outrage aside.
In the view of his critics, Mr. Trump has used the power of the federal government to promote a vision of America that not only challenges the legitimacy of the Black experience, but also demeans and dehumanizes people of color. In the process, they say, he has elevated and even endorsed a version of American culture that venerates a white-dominated society of old, and casts the history and reality of race in the United States as unwelcome or suspiciously ‘woke.’
[Emphasis added.]
Having been born to segregated America and having been treated to the worst effects of McCarthyism, I am deeply troubled by the impeding mix of racism and political purity tests Donald Trump is planning to enact:
A USCIS press release states:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is updating guidance in the USCIS Policy Manual regarding the factors that officers consider in certain benefit requests where an exercise of discretion is required, including factors relating to aliens’ past requests for parole and any involvement in anti-American or terrorist organizations, as well as the use of discretion in adjudication of certain benefit requests where evidence of antisemitic activity is present.
Separately, USCIS has expanded the types of benefit requests that receive social media vetting, and reviews for anti-American activity will be added to that vetting. Anti-American activity will be an overwhelmingly negative factor in any discretionary analysis. ‘America’s benefits should not be given to those who despise the country and promote anti-American ideologies. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is committed to implementing policies and procedures that root out anti-Americanism and supporting the enforcement of rigorous screening and vetting measures to the fullest extent possible,’ said USCIS spokesman Matthew Tragesser. ‘Immigration benefits—including to live and work in the United States—remain a privilege, not a right.’
[Emphasis added.]
The obvious question is whether or not they are really talking about anti-American ideologies or criticism of Donald Trump. Here is how The Washington Post put it:
Immigrants seeking lawful work in the United States and a legal pathway to citizenship will now be subject to screening for ‘anti-American’ behavior, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said Tuesday.
In a policy alert summarizing the updated guidance, USCIS said officers will have discretion to determine whether applicants for benefits, such as a green card, harbor anti-American views or have ‘endorsed, promoted, supported, or otherwise espoused the views of an anti-American or terrorist organization or group,’ including those that ‘support or promote antisemitic terrorism.’
The agency also said, separately, that it would expand the types of benefits requests subject to social media vetting. Experts say the new policy risks slowing down benefits processing for applicants and would deter immigrants from speaking out on political or social issues. More broadly, the guidance is reflective of the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict both legal and illegal immigration.
[Emphasis added.]
I admit it is harder and harder to muster optimism. There has always been a continuing struggle in American life beneath those who oppress and those who desire freedom, between those who exploit and enslave and those who demand fair wages, safe working conditions, the right to vote, the right to control their own bodies, and love who they love. Sadly, we have been treated to years of unrelenting propaganda and have suffered from the failure of the corporate media to ask the toughest questions or to report the uncomfortable truths, all of which has left us ever more vulnerable to the small and bigger lies. There is not a moment when those in power and the multitude of their sycophants are not lying.
And yet I am determined not to surrender to their continuing campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion, to tarnish our need to combat racism. Yes, I still deeply believe that DEI is the very heartbeat of America. And if you can’t find enough American leaders to remind you of that, how about you listen to a Canadian.
Here is Charlie Angus of Ottawa, former six-time representative of Canada’s Parliament, schooling MAGA State Sen. Joe Martin of Maine for his despicable letter suggesting Canada join the U.S.
Martin goes on to state that Canadian provinces would, of course, have to give up their laws on “gun control, speech restrictions, crown lands, or religious education that conflict with American norms.” He then asserts. “For too long, Canadian citizens have been subject to an illusion of freedom administered through bureaucratic means.” And he brags, “In Canada, firearm ownership is subject to licensing, classification, and confiscation. In the United States, it is a constitutional right that shall not be infringed. Upon admission, residents of the new American states would have the same right to keep and bear arms as those in Texas, Florida, or Wyoming.”
Well, here is Charlie’s answer to Martin MAGA. And, if you ask me, Charlie and Canada are doing a far better job of standing up for what used to be the heartbeat of America.
Some of my favorite parts:
I had to look you up and I learned, oh, you represent Maine. That’s that piece of ground that’s below the beautiful provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec. Now, in saying that, I know I’m being a little mean to Maine, but heck, you guys voted for him, so I hope you don’t mind if I put a little bit of shoulder into your chin. So, I was thinking, okay, who is this guy and what’s his offer for getting people to sell out their country?
So, I looked up your letter and what did you say? You said, well, the United States has the values of Western civilization. And so is that the same Western civilization that elects a convicted felon, a sexual predator, a guy who brags about feeding people to alligators? Is that your Western civilization? You say that this is a nation under the Constitution. So, is that the same constitution that makes it possible for guys in masks to kidnap people off the streets or the president to send the National Guard against unarmed civilians in American cities? Is that your constitution? Then, of course, you have to say that you’re a nation under Christian values …
… let me just give you a quick lesson in Canada. Number one, we believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion because our diversity makes us stronger. Uh you talk about a melting pot. Yeah. Well, shit floats and we’ve seen that. You believe in the inalienable right of any moron in the United States to walk into a gun store and come out with an AR-15 in order to shoot up a school of children, to terrorize high school students, to shoot up a church, a synagogue, or a Walmart because you don’t happen to like the Latino Americans who shop there.
Well, in Canada, we believe in the inalienable right of a family to go to the emergency ward at the hospital and get their children treated without going bankrupt because that’s what a civilized nation does. We believe in democracy where it’s one person, one vote, where elections are not decided by dark money, by super PACs, and by the oligarchs. And you know, we don’t get a lot of things right here, but we’re working on it because we believe at the end of the day that the economy shouldn’t just favor the 1%. It should ensure that we have diversity of opportunity.
Charlie Angus makes a great case that DEI is the heartbeat of Canada. Maybe if we fight hard enough, it can once more be the heartbeat of America.
