DL Open Thread: Sunday, August 6, 2023

Florida Hires Fake College To Teach Its Students.  The ‘right’ kind of indoctrination:

Last week, an organization called PragerU announced that the state of Florida had approved it as an official vendor for educational material.

This was a controversial development: PragerU’s explicit mission is to combat “leftism” in education, and until now, its materials had not made it, at least officially, into any public schools. But for Florida, the news tracks with recent trends.

The 2022 Stop W.O.K.E. Act banned schools from teaching children about privilege and systemic racism. Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration blocked an Advanced Placement course on African American studies over claims it violated state law. The state’s new educational standards, posted recently by the Florida Department of Education, equate historical acts of white supremacist violence with race riots—or, as it’s stated, with “acts of violence perpetrated by African Americans.” And the new standards require that middle school students learn how slavery taught Black people useful, specialized skills “that could be used for ‘personal benefit.’ ”

Despite its name, PragerU isn’t a university—or any kind of accredited educational institution. It was founded in 2009 by Dennis Prager, a conservative talk show host previously known for being a less inflammatory voice of the right. Prager, convinced that the key to a brighter future was to instill college students with conservative values, first dreamed of an actual university. But he and his co-founder soon realized that the venture would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, PragerU, a nonprofit, pivoted quickly to creating free, slickly produced educational videos as conservative counterprogramming.

Read the entire article to understand just how blatant these ‘educational videos’ are. ‘Frederick Douglass’ and ‘Booker T. Washington’ explaining why slavery wasn’t so bad is but one example.   I guess that if an entire state needs to be destroyed because one guy’s a complete and total nutcase, it might as well be Florida.

How Texas Leaders’ Hatred Of Obama Led To RWNJ Challenge To Traditional Constitutional Norms.  Greg Abbott in particular:

Over the previous eight years, the Texas Office of the Attorney General had transformed from a Democrat-led bureaucratic workhorse into a Republican war machine, peppering the federal courts with conservative cases and friend-of-the-court filings. Now, Greg Abbott, a man elected by 2.5 million people to be the top lawyer for one of fifty states, stepped up to do what his fellow conservatives in Washington could not: stop, or at least slow, Obama’s agenda.

During the Obama administration, Abbott’s office, and especially its elite appellate unit, the Office of the Solicitor General, became a government in exile, a refuge for the Republican party’s brightest minds. Top-tier conservative attorneys came to Texas for the chance to gain courtroom experience, burnish their bonafides and strengthen their commitment to the cause.

They had plenty of opportunities. Under Abbott, Texas brought more than 30 lawsuits against the Obama administration in six years, including an average of one suit a month in 2010. Texas used the federal courts to try to stop the federal expansion of government subsidized health care; block protections for young people who entered the country illegally with their parents; guard businesses against environmental regulations intended to stave off climate change; and even extend the fishing season by two weeks.

Abbott defined his role quite simply: “I go into the office, I sue the federal government, and then I go home.”

Yet another highly-recommended read.  Quite extensive in telling the story.

Trump Lawyer Says It Out Loud:  ‘Hell, Yes, It Was A Coup Attempt. And It Was Justified!’:

The Trump 2020 lawyer went on to reference the Declaration of Independence, saying that “our founders lay this case out.”

“There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable, tolerable while they remain tolerable,” he said. “At some point abuses become so intolerable that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.”

“So that’s the question,” he added. “Have the abuses or the threat of abuses become so intolerable that we have to be willing to push back?”

The answer, according to Eastman, was yes.

Looks like today’s theme is right-wing disinformation.  Here’s how one particularly noxious influencer became so powerful.  Again, well-researched and worthy of your time:

Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.

A decade later, writing under his real name, Hanania has ensconced himself in the national mainstream media, writing op-eds in the country’s biggest papers, bending the ears of some of the world’s wealthiest men and lecturing at prestigious universities, all while keeping his past white supremacist writings under wraps.

Meanwhile, rich benefactors, some of whose identities are unknown, have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a think tank run by Hanania. The think tank doles out cash to conservative academics, and produces political studies that are cited across right-wing media.

Hanania’s rise into mainstream conservative and even more centrist circles did not necessarily occur because he abandoned some of the noxious arguments he made under the pseudonym “Richard Hoste.” Although he’s moderated his words to some extent, Hanania still makes explicitly racist statements under his real name. He maintains a creepy obsession with so-called race science, arguing that Black people are inherently more prone to violent crime than white people. He often writes in support of a well-known racist and a Holocaust denier. And he once said that if he owned Twitter — the platform that catapulted him to some celebrity — he wouldn’t let “feminists, trans activists or socialists” post there. “Why would I?” he asked. “They’re wrong about everything and bad for society.”

I admit, a dark open thread today. Might as well close with something darker–a black cat vid.  Click on the ‘Wanted’ poster.

What do you want to talk about?