1984 or 2023?

   

"[China’s] President Xi is a brilliant man. If you went all over Hollywood to look for somebody to play the role of President Xi, you couldn't find it. There's nobody like that. The look, the brain, the whole thing." 

 Donald Trump, who never praises democratic world leaders, to Tucker Carlson on April 11th.

The red state drive to fight “woke” weaknesses – against an alleged oversensitive Democratic belief in teaching history the way it really was, current events they way they truly exist and diversity as it actually is in our American demographic reality – is an effort to protect children (in public schools) and younger people (in public colleges) from discomfort, guilt and pain. That these realities have been taught all across the United States for decades with no ostensible harm to students recorded is irrelevant. When it comes to protecting children from what now the leading single cause of child death in the United States – gun homicide – that red state drive disintegrates into an orgy of “mental illness,” “our thoughts and prayers,” and “the only way to stop of bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” misinformation and disinformation. And gun laws in red states are the least restrictive they have ever been.

The “culture wars,” backed by real statutes like the “Don’t Say Gay,” “End Critical Race Theory,” and “Stop Woke” in Florida and other red states, have allowed the most extreme in religious zealotry to set the standards for entire school districts and public libraries, often allowing the objection of a single parent or a single student to determine the appropriateness of lesson plans and what books are permitted in the local library. It’s been the GOP playbook since Trump was President. Autocrats get complimented; minority rule gets reinforced. Equality, not so much!

Prioritizing such minority views under the guise of “parental rights,” which are now also extending to public school vaccine requirements that have been in place for over half a century, have terrified teachers, school librarians, school district administrators and deprived students from a genuine education. Indeed, those education professionals, catering to the lowest common parental denominator in their school districts, now face losing their jobs and even criminal prosecution for teaching truth. Lifting longstanding vaccine requirements also places large numbers of young students at risk for serious illness as well.

The zeal of those who lead the culture wars and the antivax campaigns requires that conspiracy theories be correct, that alternative facts become axiomatic, and that the angry minority (mostly White Christian nationalists) has a God-given right to impose its views on abortion, gun control, anti-woke and anti-vax on the vast majority of Americans who hold opposing views. “We are right, and therefore we have a right to make everyone else adhere to our rules.” The ability of well-heeled extremists to forum-shop to find federal judges sympathetic to their religiously driven zeal has facilitated the resulting harsh minority rule. Judges with severe ethical lapses and unholy relationships with generous rightwing friends sit on the US Supreme Court.

There’s just one mega-catch: most of those underlying “harms to our children” and conspiracy theories are simply wrong. Judicial reasoning is often flawed. Dodd vs Women’s Health, the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roes vs Wade, was supposed to send the abortion issue back to the states for each to decide, but judges across the United States – including a rightwing Trump appointee federal judge sitting in Texas – are trying to force a national abortion ban.

A Florida high school student in a class that combined community college students, shut down a civics class that was about to discuss the history of slavery and racial discrimination… because he was “uncomfortable” with the subject matter. And it’s not just schools (classes and libraries) that are facing book bans. One Texas public library, under guise of removing “pornography,” ripped even some pretty innocuous children’s books off the shelf. “A rural Texas county that was ordered to return banned books to its public library shelves is now considering shutting down its libraries entirely. A meeting in Llano County today will include a discussion of whether to ‘continue or cease operations’ of the library system, which includes three branches. The meeting comes after a federal judge last month ordered the library system to return 12 children’s books to its shelves that had been removed, many because of their LGBTQ and racial content. It also follows several ongoing fights across the country to protect access to books in response to a boom of book bans that has taken shape in the US -- including in K-12 schools, universities and public libraries.” CNN RSS News Feed, April 12th.

Facts seldom get in the way of these zealots. For example, a flawed “study, by economist Mark Skidmore of Michigan State University, was taken as gospel truth by a legion of anti-vaccine activists… [and] gave heart to critics of COVID-19 vaccines by estimating the number of U.S. deaths from the vaccines at 278,000.” Michael Hiltzik writing for the April 12th Los Angeles Times, who added: “It had been published in BMC Infectious Diseases, a peer-reviewed medical journal associated with the Nature publishing group, which lent it a gilt-edged luster. Indeed, it ranked as the most-viewed paper in the journal’s history.

“Now take a deep breath. BMC Infectious Diseases retracted the Skidmore study on Tuesday [4/11], specifically citing doubts about ‘the validity of the conclusions’ related to death statistics because of flaws in its methodology… also raises questions about how the piece got published in the first place. As Stephanie M. Lee of the Chronicle of Higher Education has pointed out, the flaws in Skidmore’s paper were virtually self-evident from the moment it reached print…

“[Even the] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited only 19,476 reports of deaths after COVID vaccination in a national database of unverified adverse reactions to the shots… Since even that surely inflated figure, which reflects an unknown number of deaths from unrelated causes, amounted to less than three-thousandths of a percent of the 672 million doses of COVID vaccines administered in the U.S., the CDC properly judged the shots ‘safe and effective’ and severe post-vaccine reactions ‘rare.’”

Book bans, severe limitations on teaching truth in classrooms, and opposing/reversing former constitutional rights are extremely popular with a minority of Americans, and their out-and-out passion for their views has pressed an entire political party to embrace platforms that are out of step with most of us. They’ve even been willing to distort elections with gerrymandering and voter marginalization to amplify that minority at the expense of the majority. These are not bread and butter quality of everyday life issues. They do not make us feel safer or more optimistic about the future. But through intimidation with their armed surrogates, election manipulation and rightwing judges who put their religious views about the Constitution, they push that minority to an unwelcome victory in those culture wars. AR-15 anybody? Legal across the land!

I’m Peter Dekom, and when will most of us stop this madness before that culture war morphs into a real shooting civil war?