Stephan: You and I are living in a country that is barely a democracy today, and depending on how the 2022 may cease to be a democracy in November. As Thom Hartmann points out a coalition of rich fascists, White supremacists, Evangelicals, and obsessive male dominants have taken over one of America's two parties -- the Republican Party -- and are doing everything in their power, everything money can buy -- to end democracy. I don't see how this threat could be made any clearer.
Credit: Brendan Stephens
The moral panic currently sweeping America about Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been covered ad nauseum by the press and commentators across the political spectrum. That’s what typically happens with moral panics (more on that in a moment).
What nobody is talking about, though, is the why of this particular issue at this particular time. As a result, we’re mistaking the tool for the goal.
Moral panics, when driven by politicians, are usually just tools. This CRT moral panic is a tool being used by a coalition of interests to achieve their own goals, none of which have anything to do with teaching or not-teaching the history of race in America.
Here’s how it works:
Imagine you’re part of a group of libertarian billionaires who don’t believe in public education and who see any such sort of taxpayer-funded effort to improve “the underclasses” as an absurd waste of the tax dollars you “worked so hard to earn” and the “gummint” now wants to take away from you “at the barrel of a gun.”
Stephan: A reader, a woman, wrote me today asking me how it is possible the anti-choice bigots always seek to block women and girls who are raped, or are the victims of incest from termination their unwanted pregnancies should such result from these attacks. She wrote, "How could anyone not understand what a pregnancy means to the victim of such an attack?" Well, here is the answer to that question.
Garrett Soldano, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan
Garrett Soldano, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan, said this week that rape victims shouldn’t get abortions because God may have intended for them to give birth to the next president of the United States.
This person’s mother, Soldano continued, should serve as a positive example to other rape victims who get impregnated by their attackers.
“And so what we must start to focus on is not only the DNA when it’s created, but, however, how about we start inspiring women in the culture to let them understand how heroic they are,” he said. “God put them in this moment. And they don’t know, that little baby inside them may be the next president, may be the next person who changes humanity.”
Stephan: When I started reading this I thought it was a joke. Surely, even the MAGAt crazies aren't this crazy? As it turns out, yes they are. Public education is under attack in the United States in states controlled by MAGAts. All of it is about control, and attempting to brainwash children with MAGAt culture values instead of teaching them to think and learn fact-based knowledge. This has long-term implications, children with such a MAGAt education are unlikely to be prepared to become scientists, or doctors, or to even be able to think rationally.
llustration by Elizabeth Brockway / The Daily Beast
It happened every time a school board member spoke up about changes to the Central York School District’s COVID-19 plan. “Meow!” a group of four people would taunt from the back of the room. “Cat!”
Amelia McMillan, a parent in the Pennsylvania district, recognized the four people. They’d supported Central York’s recent (and now overturned) ban on certain school books, many of them about race. After the mid-January meeting ended, McMillan said she saw the group corner a local father in a hallway.
“They were yelling at him about his kid being a furry,” McMillan told The Daily Beast. The group cited “an email someone sent to the board about furries. I heard him say, ‘Leave my kid out of this.’ Two administrators from the school broke up this interaction and shuffled the four aggressors out of the building, and then asked the father if he was alright. He told everyone standing there (myself included) that they were calling his child a furry and he asked them to stop.”
Stephan: The American pharmaceutical industry is a study in greed. In the United States we have the worst drug price situation on earth. The entire operation is a racket. The government through grants to researchers pays for much of the development of drugs, which are then patented by drig corporations, and those corporations then profit from that research and set the prices Americans have to pay for those drugs. Why, any intelligent person, should ask do the same drugs for which Americans pay so much cost just a small fraction of that price in the rest of the world? The answer, of course, is that the government of the United States is notably corrupt, and bribery of public officials was legalized by Citizens United. As a result the pharmaceutical corporations routinely rent Congress men and women, particularly white Republican men, to make sure the price gouging they do remains legal and unregulated.
Demonstrators protest pharmaceutical companies’ lobbying during a rally outside Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America headquarters in Washington, D.C. on September 21, 2021. Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP / Getty
Major pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. hiked the prices of nearly 870 prescription medications during the first month of the new year as lock-step Republicans and right-wing Democrats—flush with cash from drugmakers—continue to block legislation aimed at reining in the industry.
Through January 20 of this year, according to an analysis released Sunday by Rx Savings Solutions, drugmakers raised the costs of 866 of their products in the U.S. by an average of 6.6%.
“Outrageously high prescription drug prices are now even higher.”
“Over the same period last year, drugmakers raised prices by an average of 4.5% on 893 drugs,” observed the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the new study.
“There were some large price increases. AmerisourceBergen Corp.’s Blue Point Laboratories, a seller of generic drugs, more than doubled the price of the cancer chemotherapy drug cisplatin to $30,” the Journal noted. Exelan Pharmaceuticals Inc. raised the price of […]
Stephan: I think everyone needs to be clear that about a third of the American population, this survey makes it 25%, is not only willing to consider a violent civil war, but actually wants it. This is primarily the White racist community, and these people are dangerous, and the rest of us should not have any doubt about that.
Trump supporters climb the west wall of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A new survey finds 1 in 10 Americans say violent protests are justified. Credit: Jose Luis Magana/AP
Nearly a quarter of Americans say it’s sometimes OK to use violence against the government — and 1 in 10 Americans say violence is justified “right now.”
That’s the finding of a new report by The COVID States Project, which asked 23,000 people across the country whether it is “ever justifiable to engage in violent protest against the government?” The report is one of several in recent months that find people more likely to contemplate violent protests than they had been in the past.
Nearly 1 in 4 said violence was either “definitely” or “probably” justifiable against the government. A similar percentage of liberals and conservatives agree on this point.
That’s not surprising when you think about how American history is taught, said COVID States Project co-director David Lazer.
“You know, we begin with the American Revolution against an illegitimate government and so we are, in a sense, […]
