Climate change non-education

An effective way to keep people from opposing or supporting something that elites want or don’t want is to keep the public as ignorant, deceived, disinformed, confused and/or distracted as much as possible. A great way to foster ignorance and disinformation is to simply not teach subjects that elites want the public to remain ignorant and disinformed about. The NYT writes:

Many States Omit Climate Education. These Teachers Are Trying to Slip It In.

Around the United States, middle school science standards have minimal references to climate change and teachers on average spend just a few hours a year teaching it.

In mid-October, just two weeks after Hurricane Ian struck her state, Bertha Vazquez asked her class of seventh graders to go online and search for information about climate change. Specifically, she tasked them to find sites that cast doubt on its human causes and who paid for them.

It was a sophisticated exercise for the 12-year-olds, Ms. Vazquez said, teaching them to discern climate facts from a mass of online disinformation. But she also thought it an important capstone to the end of two weeks she dedicates to teaching her Miami students about climate change, possible solutions and the barriers to progress.

.... in Florida, where Ms. Vazquez has taught for more than 30 years, and where her students are already seeing the dramatic impacts of a warming planet, the words “climate change” do not appear in the state’s middle or elementary school education standards.

“Middle school is where these kids are starting to get their moral compass and to back that compass up with logic,” said Michael Padilla, a professor emeritus at Clemson University and a former president of the National Science Teachers Association. “So middle school is a classic opportunity to have more focus on climate change.”

For those who do receive formal instruction on climate change, it will most likely happen in middle school science classrooms. But many middle school standards don’t explicitly mention climate change, so it falls largely on teachers and individual school districts to find ways to integrate it into lessons, often working against the dual hurdles of limited time and inadequate support.

Ms. Vazquez really went out on a limb to admit she teaches climate change in Florida, which politically is anti-climate change science. She has moral courage, but maybe not a job for much longer. A way to fire her will probably be found soon. And, radical right Republican climate science deniers like Rick DeSantis will look into ways to get laws passed in Florida to stop the teaching about climate change and science. DeSantis will attack it as socialist lies, groomer indoctrination and whatever other crackpottery seems good enough to keep the base angry, fearful, distracted, deceived and ignorant.

An ignorant public is a much more gullible and deceivable public than a well-informed public. The Republican Party understands this. That underpins ruthless Republican efforts to maintain ignorance and deceit about climate change.

News Snippet: How Republicans are slowly killing democracy

We're in a period of death of democracy the rule of law and civil liberties by thousands of cuts coming over at least several decades. Attacks on government, secularism and inconvenient truth are all intensifying. Here is another example.

NBC News writes: 

Chief Justice Roberts temporarily blocks release of Trump's tax records to House Democrats

Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday [that is today folks] temporarily blocked a congressional committee from accessing former President Donald Trump’s tax records.

Trump, unlike other recent presidents, has refused to make his tax returns public amid scrutiny of his business affairs, and turned to the justices after an appeals court in Washington refused to intervene on the release of the records. The high court has recently rejected similar requests made by Trump.

Trump’s lawyers say the House Ways and Means Committee’s assertion that it needs the information to probe how the IRS conducts the auditing process for presidents does not stand up to scrutiny.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined Thursday to reconsider a three-judge panel’s ruling in August that the committee could obtain the tax returns.

As usual, the MSM does not get it, or if it does, it is incompetent. That's normal these days and has been for years.

What NBC fails to point out is that (i) Roberts blocked release until after the election, (ii) Trump is not running for any office so there is no reason for timing it to the election, and (iii) if the Republicans retake the House, as some polling indicates is likely, that temporary block will be permanent. Once the Repubs retake the House, that is the end of all House investigation into Trump's treason and crimes. That leaves the DoJ and Garland. There is little or no hope for justice emanating from the clueless paralyzed Garland.

Once again, a Republican judge on the Supreme Court protects a corrupt Republican elite. And by delaying as much as possible, Trump once again gets away with treason and/or crimes.

The rule of law has fallen. The rest of democracy is next. Our freedoms come right after that.

My grade for the MSM: Rock solid F (failure).

My grade for the Republican Party, the enemy of the people and democracy: F--- (triple minus F).

What the radical right rank and file thinks

New poll data by PRRI is published and it sheds light on support for Republican extremists. A WaPo opinion piece comments:

For answers, turn to the Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey, which provides insight into the beliefs of White evangelical Christians, who make up the core of the GOP. It reveals a lot about what they think and why they vote the way they do.

A striking 71 percent of these voters think the country has gone downhill since the 1950s (when women were excluded from most professions, Black Americans faced barriers to voting, 50 million Americans still used outhouses and only about 5 percent of Americans were college-educated). Because White Protestant evangelicals make up such a large share of the GOP, that means 66 percent of Republicans want to go back to the time of “Leave It to Beaver.”

Half of White evangelical Protestants also think God intended America to be the promised land. Nearly two-thirds say immigrants are a threat, and 61 percent say “society has become too soft and feminine.” And they are the only discrete religious group polled to support overturning Roe v. Wade.

On race, only 19 percent of the group agrees that “the legacy of slavery and discrimination have limited Black Americans’ upward mobility.” They are the least likely to accept that African Americans disproportionately receive the death penalty. And here’s the kicker: Unlike a majority of Americans, “six in ten white evangelical Protestants (61%) agree that discrimination against white Americans has become as big a problem as discrimination against racial minorities.”

Given these figures, it shouldn’t be surprising that while 58 percent of Americans think white supremacy is still a major problem, only 33 percent of White evangelical Protestants do, the lowest among religious groups. Similarly, 51 percent of the group believe that public teachers and librarians are “indoctrinating students with inappropriate curricula and books that wrongly portray America as a racist country,” compared with only 29 percent of Americans broadly.  

And on immigration, only 30 percent of Americans buy into the “great replacement theory.” But 51 percent of White evangelical Protestants agree that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.”  

In a nutshell, this group’s beliefs clash with the essence of the American experiment and conflict with objective facts, demography and economics. White evangelical Protestants’ outlook is warped by right-wing media and refracted through a prism of visceral anger and resentment.

It makes little sense to debate whether the MAGA movement radicalized White evangelical Protestants or the other way around. They are essentially one and the same.  

Last year, Eastern Illinois University professor Ryan Burge wrote for the New York Times, “In essence, many Americans are coming to the understanding that to be very religiously engaged and very politically conservative means that they are evangelical, even if they don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.” In other words, Burge explained, more people are “conflating evangelicalism with Republicanism — and melding two forces to create a movement that is not entirely about politics or religion but power.” (This helps explain how evangelicals can embrace views that fly in the face of Christian theology; it’s not about the religion.)

From what I can tell, White evangelical Protestants were radicalized decades before Trump came on the scene. He just normalized bad things like Christian radicalism, bigotry, rage-mongering and acceptance of lies and slanders. For the radical right, religion has merged into politics. God's dogma is actually Republican Party dogma. The rank and file just cannot see this. Decades of toxic Republican Party propaganda has done its job quite well.

News digest

A court grows a pair? 

The Texas Tribune writes:

Two leaders of True the Vote jailed by federal judge for contempt of court

Federal marshals escorted the leaders of True the Vote out of a Houston courtroom on Monday morning and into a holding cell. Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips have been held in contempt of court for refusing to release the name of a person of interest in the defamation and computer hacking case against them, who they claim, without proof, is a confidential FBI informant.

They will remain in jail until they release the name of the man.

Election software company Konnech is suing Engelbrecht and Phillips for defamation. Konnech claims that a right-wing election denier group, True the Vote, defamed the technology company. Engelbrecht and Phillips claim the technology company’s software had security flaws and they were just innocent patriots exposing bad election-related things.

Occasionally courts will jail a journalist for refusing to disclose the names of their anonymous sources. But that is journalism protected by the Constitution’s freedom of the press clause in the First Amendment. As far as I know, courts rarely jail people for contempt, especially in politics-related cases. This is a politics-related civil lawsuit. Without evidence of the source of the defamatory information, it will be impossible to prove intent (“degree of fault” in some states).

Under Texas law, a plaintiff, Konnech in this case, must show or prove (1) the publication of a false statement of fact to a third party, (2) that was defamatory concerning the plaintiff, (3) with the requisite degree of fault, at least amounting to negligence, and (4) damages, in some cases. If Engelbrecht and Phillips really believed the information was from an FBI informant, that might get them off the hook for intent or degree of fault, and thus for liability for defamation. 

Clarence Thomas is clueless (Alito is too)

The Supreme Court is currently hearing a case about affirmative action in college admissions. Given decades of radical right animosity to affirmative action, one can reasonably expect the last vestiges of it to be obliterated. Law and Crime summarizes Thomas’ confusion in an article entitled:

Justice Thomas Says He Does Not ‘Have a Clue’ What Diversity Means at Oral Arguments in College Affirmative Action Case.

 

Apparently, it does not occur to Thomas to simply ask the parties what diversity means. Actually, he knows what it means. By making his arrogant, snarky comment, Thomas signals what is his vote is going to be. Alito made similar comments. Thomas and Alito have decided the outcome before all the evidence in the case was heard and considered. That is the opposite of how judges are supposed to judge. But it is how radical right Republican judges judge.

It will be interesting to see what the Republicans on the court come up with as their reasoning to kill affirmative action. The NYT comments on the impact of affirmative action’s death: “Such a decision would jeopardize affirmative action at colleges and universities around the nation, particularly elite institutions, decreasing the representation of Black and Latino students and bolstering the number of white and Asian ones.” That result has been a cherished long-term goal of Christian nationalists. They will very likely get their wish soon.

In the oral arguments, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson framed the issue by asking whether America’s history of racial discrimination still matters. Apparently, it does not to the Republicans. The past is past, racism is dead and no more needs to be done. That is core Christian nationalist dogma.