Civil rights attorney Ben Crump is reportedly set to announce his plans to sue Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over the rejection of an Advanced Placement African American Studies (APAAS) course on the grounds that holy cow, can you believe how unbelievably craven and racist you have to be to reject an African American Studies class? When asked what was so indoctrinating about the AP course, DeSantis told reporters that a chapter titled “Black Queer Studies” in an African American Studies course proved something insidious. “This course on Black history, what's one of the lessons about? Queer theory. Now who would say that an important part of Black history is queer theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda,” barfed the governor into a microphone.
The anti-LGBTQ+, pro-racism agenda remains the only cultural policy for conservatives to pursue. This has been true since the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was able to accelerate the deregulation of our economy while destroying the already-weak social net we had in place, all while using the religious right at the time as cultural cover. But the whistle (even dogs don’t respond to this dreck) continues to be the only instrument in the Republican Party’s tool box. Now they just use new phrases such as “critical race theory” and “kitty litter in schools.”
But these cruel political theatrics play well with the small group of people who retain some shapeless bigotry, powered by an unstructured sense of grievance. Logic means nothing in this world, as is demonstrated by the responses. An OAN interview with a member of one such group, “Moms for Liberty,” best known for being super duper transphobic and homophobic, has made its rounds and is worth the watch if only to publicly ridicule the people involved.
RELATED STORY: DeSantis blocks College Board from introducing AP African American Studies course in Florida
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In the video on some OAN interview show called Real America with Dan Ball, a woman identified as Tara Petsch, chair of the Gillespie County, Texas, chapter of Moms for Liberty, is on to talk about DeSantis’ rejection of the APAAS course. The video starts with her saying she left the Houston area to get away from “this stuff,” but that even in her rural area they are “fighting this thing.” The thing seems to be Black, brown, and gay people. “I am so grateful that Ron DeSantis is exposing advanced placement program.” Think about that sentence for a few seconds. Not too many seconds, just a few. Hold onto your chair—there’s more. “The AP program has been woke for a while. There have been concerns with them already and this agenda is being infiltrated into rural America, because that is the only voting block that liberals do not have.” Ball chimes in, saying, “Exactly. That’s why they want to brainwash them.”
Got all that? A quick reminder: The United States is a representative democracy where the idea, which is hard to grasp for some, is that the majority of people are represented in our government by a majority of representatives. That’s how it is supposed to work. Rural populations in the United States make up about 14% of the U.S. population. Let her previous statement sink in. Grievances.
How about an example of this “infiltrated into” action phrase you have come up with? Ball has a completely made-up example! “Like for instance, I just heard of a girl wanting to be a cat near my hometown in Ohio, and she’s like suing her parents and the school so she can be a cat.” Huh. Not a thing, by the way. This hasn’t happened. It’s a lie. It’s fake news.
This isn’t the first or second or third time Ball has promoted easily disprovable lies on his platform. If the name rings a bell, he’s the host who promoted an anti-vaxxer claim that the COVID-19 had turned them “magenta.” The color … magenta.
If you search for this new claim, you come up with one semi-dubious story sourced by way of the Mirror in the United Kingdom. The story is dated to the end of August and speaks about a “phenomenally bright” female student in a private school in Melbourne, Australia, who is reportedly allowed to act like a cat in school as long as she does her school work and does not create a disruption in class.
Right-wing rag the Washington Examiner points to “multiple news stories” on the matter, but when you take more than five seconds to click through, you will see that the single other news story they are turning into “multiple” is a literal aggregation of the Mirror story. As an aside, the Mirror is one of the British newspapers investigated and then busted for hacking phones illegally. Piers Morgan was an editor there at the time.
So a private school in Australia might have a kid who identifies as a cat of an indeterminate age. Not unlike the kitty litter lies being pushed by the right, the truth of the lies say far more insidious things about the people lying than they do about the lie.
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Markos and Kerry are joined by University of St. Andrews Professor of Strategic Studies Phillips P. O’Brien. O’Brien, an expert in military history, explains how we got to where we are right now, what is unique about the world’s reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the parallels between the conservative movement’s isolationism in World War II and now.
