Why, O Why, Won't Liberal Professors Please Save Republican Party From Itself?
An argument with no audience at all.
In one of the strangest calls for bipartisan — or maybe transpartisan? — unity we've ever seen, the New York Times (gift link) yesterday offered an op-ed by Jon Shields, a history prof at the very very conservative Claremont McKenna College, arguing that if liberals in academe would like to help save America, then liberal professors should "rescue the GOP" — by becoming mentors to bright young conservative students and by teaching courses on conservative thought. This, Shields argues, would be good not only for the students and for conservatism, but also for universities and American politics.
Honestly, it's such a naive argument, and so utterly divorced from modern political reality, that I kind of want to pat the essay on the head and say "goodness, you mean well, don't you? Have you looked outside, though?" It's as if David Brooks were huffing the concentrated vapors of uncut Kumbayah juice.
The are you kidding me? You've got to be kidding me! vibes start with the first sentence and continue throughout the whole mess:
When conservative undergraduates look around for mentors these days, who do they find? Not conservative professors, at least not very often. Our ranks have been slowly vanishing since the 1980s. Instead, those students find organizers from the MAGA-verse who teach them how to own the libs. That’s who is instructing the next generation of Republican leaders, modeling how to act and think like good conservatives. It’s a squalid education, one that deepens their alienation from the university and guarantees that the next generation of elected officials will make Ron DeSantis’s war against higher education look tame.
Who will mentor these poor wandering conservatives? All they have is the poisonous MAGA people, and they aren't conservatives, they're wild people!
Shields doesn't exactly say why conservative professors are so hard to find in universities these days, although there's certainly an implication that liberals drove them out because that's how progressives just do things. Nor does Shields give even a moment's discussion to how it is that conservative intellectuals have become so rare, much less why the MAGA folks have driven all the sensible smart conservatives from the GOP. (The abbreviation "RINO" appears nowhere in the essay, even though it's key to understanding how the wild-eyed crazies have ejected whatever intellectuals were still in the party.)
Still, Shields thinks it would really be a great thing if all the liberals who now make up the bulk of academe could help out and nurture conservative thought on campus, like a captive breeding program would help restore a species that's on the verge of extinction. Liberal professors can fix this sorry situation and teach conservative students
how to become thoughtful and knowledgeable partisans — by exposing them to a rich conservative intellectual tradition that stretches back to Enlightenment thinkers like Edmund Burke, David Hume and Adam Smith. They could mentor their conservative students, set up reading groups, help vet speakers and create courses on the conservative intellectual tradition.
Conservative academics are apparently now so rare in the wild that they can't do any of that themselves, so perhaps liberal profs can hand-feed the fragile conservative nestlings, like how the San Diego Zoo fed California Condor chicks by using puppets that looked like adult condors — you wouldn't want the young conservatives imprinting on a liberal prof who might infect them with postmodernism.
On and on it goes, with suggestions for how liberal profs could be trained in summer seminars on how to teach the great conservative thinkers, and a recommendation for "the uninformed and skeptical alike" to read at least the intro to Jerry Z. Muller's Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought From David Hume to the Present, just to understand why conservative ideas are important for liberals to understand, because shouldn't we conserve the best things of our culture and institutions?
These systems of social control are complex, easy to dismantle and difficult to rebuild. For these reasons, conservatives are leery of campaigns that promise to liberate us from a host of norms and institutions that the left sometimes sees as unjust, like marriage, religion, gender roles, the police and sexual repression.
Mmm-hmmm, sure. Liberals want to completely throw all that away, don't we? By way of further example, Shields says he always has his students, "most of whom are quite liberal" (and they chose Claremont McKenna?), read books by conservative thinkers with companion books by liberals, so they can appreciate the value of the Old Ways. Like marriage, for instance, which in its traditional form
builds wealth, softens men and creates an ideal environment for privileged children to flourish, while for most everyone else, the expansion of sexual and romantic freedom has undermined family life, deepening inequality in its wake.
Look, you knew we were going to get to the "unmarried commitment-free fucking leaves you empty and unfulfilled" part eventually, right?
In any case, we liberals need to promote thoughtful conservatism for the good of America, and to call attention to "the wisdom it still has to offer us in an age in which the G.O.P. has descended into madness." Why, one student who read a book on marriage even told Shields, "I think I need to rethink my life."
Powerful. Then, no doubt the student went home and stopped selling death sticks.
Shields really wants liberal profs to help him, though, as if they were his only hope. Just look how terrible the role models for tender young conservatives have become!
The people now teaching them to think and act like conservatives mostly belong to Trumpist outfits like Turning Point USA, which recruits and trains young conservatives to be campus activists. (Turning Point has taken to hosting deliberate provocations like affirmative action bake sales, in which students are charged different prices, depending on their race.)
The point of these stunts isn’t just to provoke liberal outrage on campus; it’s to alienate conservative kids from their surroundings. Turning Point’s bombastic founder, Charlie Kirk, a college dropout, wants his young protégés to feel every bit as contemptuous of higher education as he does. As he told Fox News, “Anything but college.”
Conservative students, though, might start saying “Anything but Trumpism” if they learn about a more enlightened alternative.
Hmm. We do hope Professor Shields is aware that rightwing students started getting hilarious mocking larffs with "affirmative action bake sales" as far back as 2003, a decade and a half before Charlie Kirk was in diapers (at least the second time), yes? And that rightwing contempt for higher education is probably older than William F. Buckley's attempts to bring some erudition to segregation?
Even if Shields comes off as a daffy naif in his essay, his idea does have at least this much to recommend it: If liberal profs actually did start teaching today's young conservative students about the beauties of the conservative intellectual tradition, the young righties might decide to reject conservatism altogether, since clearly Burke and Hume are nothing more than commie indoctrination.
[NYT (gift link) / Wonkette photoshoop made using DreamStudio v1.5 AI]
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Florida Bill Doing Best To Out-Worst All Other Bans On Gender-Affirming Care
Would take trans kids from parents, since GOP already fine with family separation.
As Yr Wonkette covered yesterday, and as brought to our attention by the invaluable Erin in the Morning, the state of Florida (Motto: "America's Useless Appendage") is considering a whole swath of terrible legislation that if passed, would make life even more miserable for LGBTQ+ people there. It's understandable, really — there are so many Republicans in the state Legislature, and they all want a turn at proving that they can hate LGBTQ+ folks as much or more than their peers.
Read More:
Florida LGBTQ Hate Bills Want Some Bigot To Have 'Parental Rights' Over Everybody Else's Children
Red States About Five Minutes Away From Legalized Lynching Of Trans People
Today, we'll take a closer look (again, thanks to Erin Reed) at just one of those very bad ideas, Florida HB 1421, which drunkenly tells other states' bans on gender affirming care for trans youth, "Hold my beer" before jumping on a skateboard and launching itself into the abyss. A Florida House subcommittee yesterday voted to move HB 1421 out of committee. After hearings in a second committee, the bill is likely to be sent to the full House, where it's likely to pass. It's Florida, and Republicans have an 85-35 majority of seats.
It's not only an extremist bill, it's also so broadly written that in attempting to outlaw gender-affirming care for minors, it also may make mastectomies for breast cancer illegal and ban hormone treatments for menopause. We can't entirely guarantee that's a mistake. The bill doesn't simply ban gender-affirming treatment going forward: It would force detransition on trans youth. All minors currently receiving puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy would have to end treatment by December 31 of this year. Such forced detransitioning is almost certain to lead to suicides, not that the psycho bigots supporting the bill care.
As ever: If you're having thoughts of harming yourself, call the national suicide and crisis lifeline at 988.
This being Florida, the bill keeps getting worse. One provision would allow the state to take trans kids from their parents to "protect" them from getting gender-affirming care in another state.
As with several similar bills around the country, the law also forbids insurance plans from covering gender-affirming care for adults, because the bill's sponsor, the dubiously named Rep. Randy Fine — a former gambling industry executive, not a doctor — says he believes all medical care for trans people is merely "a cosmetic-type procedure, and not necessarily a procedure that would improve their health." Yes, of course he's ignoring the consensus among medical organizations that transition is the treatment for gender dysphoria, and that, yes, it saves lives.
Because the bill bans the state from paying for any gender-affirming care, it would also result in forcible detransition for incarcerated trans people. The bill's sponsor was very clear on that when another state representative asked. Further, the blanket prohibition on puberty blockers and hormone therapy would probably prohibit some treatments for stunted growth in children. Another legislator said that, as she read the bill, it may ban contraception for minors, although Fine said he didn't think it would.
HB 1421 also prohibits any changes to birth certificates to reflect an adult's gender identity. State Rep. Kelly Skidmore (D) had questions about why a bill supposedly aimed at "protecting" children would do that; Fine (again, not a doctor) explained that "your biology cannot be changed," to which Skidmore replied, "Doctors would disagree. [...] You can change your biology. That's the point of gender-affirming care and surgery."
Fine then muttered something about chromosomes, which kind of ignores the fact that hormone therapy very definitely changes a person's biology, what with the differences in hair growth, body chemistry, and so on. But not chromosomes!
Fine went on to explain that gender-affirming care for minors is "child abuse," although he acknowledged that's his personal opinion, not actually a law. But co-sponsor Rep. Ralph Massullo — who somehow is a doctor — insisted it was just like "If you chop your sons arm off it's child abuse," so there's a doctor who knows his stuff. Massullo also explained, contrary to the medical consensus, that since gender dysphoria is all in trans people's heads, they should see a therapist and get cured through good old conversion therapy, which doesn't work.
The most glaringly insane part of the bill is the former gambling executive's medically muddy definition of "gender clinical interventions," a term that isn't actually from medicine. HB 1421 defines such interventions as
procedures or therapies that alter internal or external physical traits.
The term includes, but is not limited to:
1. Sex reassignment surgeries or any other surgical procedures that alter primary or secondary sexual characteristics.
2. Puberty blocking, hormone, and hormone antagonistic therapies.
The bill allows a few exceptions, such as for treatment of infants born with ambiguous genitalia, and of course for treatments to reverse gender-affirming care, but that's about it; as House Democrats pointed out, the broad prohibitions on altering "primary or secondary sexual characteristics" appears to ban mastectomies, breast reduction or enhancement, maybe prostate surgery, and who knows, maybe even penile implants for treatment of erectile dysfunction.
But wait! Since it only applies to minors, Fine figured that wouldn't be a problem. During questioning by state Rep. Christine Hunschofsky (D), Fine was surprised to hear that minors can even have breast cancer, though he remained skeptical of that anyway, and mocked what he said was the "pervasive problem of youth breast cancer." Probably just an excuse to get top surgery, right sir?
Oh yes, and because it's so sloppily written, the bill would also ban insurance from covering breast cancer mastectomies — for adults too, since the insurance ban is for all "gender clinical interventions," regardless of the patient's age.
Will Larkins, an 18-year-old high school student, testified against the bill, telling the committee members that his transgender friends would be directly harmed by the bill, not "protected." He begged the lawmakers to at least agree to a Democratic amendment that would allow youth who have already begun treatment to continue it.
"That health care has saved their lives. You will kill them. I am telling you right now — look me in the eyes — you will kill them if you pass this bill and you don’t pass this amendment. [...] You will kill them if you force them to detransition."
The committee rejected the amendment, because there are no trans people in Florida, just punching bags to beat up on for the cameras.
This is where we wish we could tell you that HB 1421 is so obviously unconstitutional that there's no chance it will pass and be signed into law, but you've been here for a while and you wouldn't ever fall for a hopeful lie like that. We don't even think they'd listen to our new hero, Grace Linn, that wonderful centenarian wonder woman. But who knows? Bet she'd make a trans lives matter quilt if she thought it would help.
[HuffPo / Florida HB 1421 / Erin Reed on Twitter / New Republic / Image generated by DreamStudio Lite AI]
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Mean Federal Court Still Won't Let Ron DeSantis Cast Woke Demons Out Of Colleges
But ... but ... that means the woke will keep woking!
Wokeness and critical race theory and Marxist indoctrination can continue to run rampant in Florida colleges and universities after a federal court ruled Thursday to keep in place an injunction against enforcing the "Stop WOKE" Act. The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals denied a request by Gov. Ron DeSantis's administration to please let it stop some woke, even just a little, while the case is being decided.
In November, US District Judge Mark Walker determined the law, which would restrict how colleges and universities can teach about race and gender, was unconstitutional as all fuck, because what part of free speech don't you understand? In a remarkably fun decision to read, Walker called the law "positively dystopian" and cited George Orwell in his order, adding that the bill's formal name, the "Individual Freedom Act," was a dandy example of doublespeak.
As we said at the time, it's awfully refreshing to see an invocation of Orwell by someone who has actually read and understood the dear old lifelong socialist who thought basic human decency might yet have a chance against totalizing ideologies.
In yesterday's 26-word order, a three-judge panel of the appeals court turned down the state's request to stay the injunction Walker issued in November. It also directed the court clerk to "treat any motion for reconsideration of this order as a non-emergency matter," just in case Florida decided to get shirty. In an act of judicial decorum, the appeals panel did not add "Neener-neener, you fascists."
The 2022 law, Florida HB 7 (22R), is yet another of those copy-pasted bills against teaching "divisive concepts" in public schools, but tweaked to apply to higher education and to businesses that offer training on implicit bias and the like. (A separate lawsuit already put on hold the bill's restrictions against private businesses.)
As Politico 'splains, the law expanded Florida's existing anti-discrimination law to protect the sensitive feelings of anyone who might have conniptions when told that other people have been discriminated against, how dare you. The bill prohibits institutions of higher education from ever causing students to feel sad in lessons about race or sex.
Inspired by DeSantis, it takes aim at lessons over issues like “white privilege” by creating new protections for students and workers, including that a person should not be instructed to “feel guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” due to their race, color, sex or national origin.
As we always point out, OF COURSE no one would ever teach that white children are guilty for things like slavery or Jim Crow, but the problem with these "divisive concepts" laws is that they're written so vaguely that any teaching about racism or sexism could potentially get an instructor or school sued and penalized.
The law was challenged last year in a lawsuit brought by Dr. Adriana Novoa, a history prof at the University of South Florida, and by student Sam Recheck, who are represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a national campus free speech nonprofit. Supporting briefs have been filed by the usual woke suspects like the ACLU and groups supporting academic freedom, even for people who will never ever vote for Ron DeSantis, and how is that even fair?
FIRE issued a statement yesterday saying
“Professors must be able to discuss subjects like race and gender without hesitation or fear of state reprisal. Any law that limits the free exchange of ideas in university classrooms should lose in both the court of law and the court of public opinion."
DeSantis spokesdork Bryan Griffin said the administration will win for sure, and look at how those dopey judges only decided the actual matter before them instead of something else:
"The Court did not rule on the merits of our appeal. The appeal is ongoing, and we remain confident that the law is constitutional."
Gov. DeSantis himself hasn't yet said anything about the decision, probably because he's still scooping gobs of pudding into his mouth with his gross fingers. Does he wash first? Or after? Who even knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[Politico / WFLA / Law & Crime / Photo: Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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Proposed Florida Textbooks Won't Say Why Rosa Parks Stayed Seated. Maybe She Was Stubborn, Who Knows?
She probably should've taken an Uber.
Now that Ron DeSantis has scrubbed all the woke out of Florida math textbooks, it's time for the state's social studies textbooks to be winnowed, so that no traces of critical race theory remains, and so no children feel guilty or sad about history. The New York Times reports (gift link) that as part of the periodic review of textbooks this year,
a small army of state experts, teachers, parents and political activists have combed thousands of pages of text — not only evaluating academic content, but also flagging anything that could hint, for instance, at critical race theory.
Remember, of course, that while in academia, critical race theory is a graduate-level topic of study, on the right, CRT means anything that makes white people fretting about The Blacks uncomfortable.
One group involved in the effort, the Florida Citizens Alliance, determined that 29 of the 38 textbooks its volunteers examined were simply inappropriate for use in Florida, and urged the Florida Department of Education to reject them. The Times notes that the group's co-founders helped out with education policy during DeSantis's transition (to governor, not in a trans kind of way, heavens!), and that it has "helped lead a sweeping effort to remove school library books deemed as inappropriate, including many with L.G.B.T.Q. characters."
We bet the books they rejected were just full of critical racecars and critical footraces! Just how bad were these awful textbooks?
In a summary of its findings submitted to the state last month, the group complained that a McGraw Hill fifth-grade textbook, for example, mentioned slavery 189 times within a few chapters alone. Another objection: An eighth-grade book gave outsize attention to the “negative side” of the treatment of Native Americans, while failing to give a fuller account of their own acts of violence, such as the Jamestown Massacre of 1622, in which Powhatan warriors killed more than 300 English colonists.
Good call, because while Native Americans may have been genocided by disease — and later by US federal policy — some fought back, and that evens everything out.
Hilariously, the Times also notes that that the White Citizens Council Florida Citizens Alliance is "pushing the state to add curriculum from Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in Michigan that is active in conservative politics." There's just one little problem, though, because what Hillsdale offers for K-12 history and civics isn't in any sense a "textbook," but instead a set of guidelines for teachers, with recommended primary readings like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and probably Rush Limbaugh's awful children's books (we're guessing on that one). But it's from Hillsdale so that's what the kids need.
The Times simply notes that "The curriculum was not included in Florida’s official review, and the state did not comment on the group’s recommendations."
Moar Here!
Rush Limbaugh's Crappy Books Will Save Kids From A.P. History
Biden Just Deleted The Stupid Ahistorical Bullsh*ts Of T---p's '1776 Commission Report'
Florida Takes Its Turn On 'Please Don't Make White People Uncomfortable' Bandwagon
Ask The Gay Penguins How 'Limited' Florida's 'Don't Say Gay' Law Is. YOU CAN'T THEY'RE BANNED
Florida's Education Department actually does require that schools teach Black history, although how exactly that's supposed to be done in a way that won't upset any hypervigilant rightwing parents isn't entirely clear. The Times says the department
emphasized that the requirements were recently expanded, including to ensure students understood “the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on individual freedoms.”
As we all know, slavery and Jim Crow were bad because they were regrettable departures from America's founding ideas of freedom and equality, which were always the norm except in certain unfortunate moments (from 1619 through 1965 and elsewhere).
In a very sad attempt to win favor with Florida, an outfit called "Studies Weekly," a minor-league publisher of weekly social-studies pamphlets mostly for early elementary grades, attempted to completely remove race from its first-grade lessons on Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. That took some doing!
The absolutely essential progressive parent group the Florida Freedom to Read Project provided the Times with three different versions of Studies Weekly's very brief lessons on Parks. The first is currently used in Florida schools, and is pretty accurate:
"In 1955, Rosa Parks broke the law. In her city, the law said African Americans had to give up their seats on the bus if a white person wanted to sit down. She would not give up her seat. The police came and took her to jail."
There were also two versions created for the new textbook review; the Times points out it's not clear which one the company submitted, and as it turns out, Studies Weekly was rejected because it messed up its paperwork, so we'll never know what the Florida Department of Education thought of the Rosa Parks lessons.
One version mentions race only indirectly:
"Rosa Parks showed courage. One day, she rode the bus. She was told to move to a different seat because of the color of her skin. She did not. She did what she believed was right."
Another version eliminates race altogether, making it really unclear whether Parks was a hero or just kind of a jerk.
"Rosa Parks showed courage. One day, she rode the bus. She was told to move to a different seat. She did not. She did what she believed was right."
It's really something of a wonder that there wasn't a third revision that simply said "Rosa Parks showed courage. She rode a bus. Good for her! Buses are big and scary!"
A fourth-grade lesson about discrimination following the Civil War and Reconstruction had similarly bizarre edits. In the initial version, the lesson explained that even after the war, many people in former Confederate states "believed African-Americans should be enslaved" and that they were "not equal to anyone in their community." (Yes, that's already problematic since it suggests white is the norm, but oh my, it gets very much worse.)
That got revised to the far weirder observation that "many communities in the South held on to former belief systems that some people should have more rights than others in their community."
And where the initial discussion of Southern "Black Codes" made very clear that African Americans were regularly denied their basic rights, the second version still uses the term "Black Codes," but says only that it became "a crime for men of certain groups to be unemployed" and that "certain groups of people" were prevented from serving on juries. Sounds like members of those certain groups were treated like they were particular individuals.
For the little it's worth, the Times also adds that
The Florida Department of Education suggested that Studies Weekly had overreached. Any publisher that “avoids the topic of race when teaching the Civil Rights movement, slavery, segregation, etc. would not be adhering to Florida law,” the department said in a statement.
The story also notes that it's not clear yet whether other publishers attempted similar decolorization; to find out, we may have to wait until Florida announces the textbooks that passed muster.
Until then, we'll just have to hope none of the textbooks explain that the Voting Rights Act was passed after John Lewis and a certain group of his friends took a leisurely Sunday stroll across a bridge.
[NYT (gift link)]
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